Into the void...

2002-07-08

1:10 p.m.

Last Wednesday, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they decided to close the office on Friday, as well as Thursday (for the Fourth of July), so I had a nice, long, four-day weekend. It was really nice to have some additional time to spend with Rob, and we had the opportunity to just be lazy as all hell and enjoy our binary solitude.

We didn't get up the motivation to actually do anything until the ungodly heat forced us to buy an additional air-conditioner. Once we called over fifty stores in the Boston area, all of which were sold out of air-conditioning units, we finally found one that just had to do, and that was that. Aside from the air-conditioner exploit, though, we didn't get out of the apartment till Sunday. Sunday (yesterday), we went to one of the art museums at the school where I work, and I finally got to see my first, real, actual, true-to-life, original van Gogh painting.

It was really something.

It's interesting how much more you get out of paintings when you've studied something about them. Since I've been doing so much research about van Gogh for this newest book of mine, I saw so much more in this one painting than I've ever seen in a painting before in my life. I could actually see all of van Gogh's struggles, his life-long ailments, his worrisome affairs, and everything he encompassed in his life come together in the strokes of that single painting.

I was looking at van Gogh.

Of course, I don't really intend the pun involved when you know that this was a self-portrait at which I was looking. What I really mean is that, having learned a great deal about van Gogh as a man, it was nearly enough to knock me over, seeing a work painted by HIM.

It was like seeing a dead man resurrected.

Staring at the painting, I found myself becoming entangled in the brushstrokes, and my brain tried to rearrange them until I could peel them off collectively and see what went into the creation of that painting. I saw each stroke as it was applied, and I saw each ounce of paint as it was in the tube before van Gogh, the artist, the creator, the MAN squeezed it out to dip his brush in it.

I saw his dissatisfaction with every stroke. I saw the mirror at which he squinted and in which he deliberately scrutinized his own form. I saw the easel upon which the canvas sat until it was set out to dry on the floor in a room of the great Yellow House in which he and Gauguin lived in Arles in 1888.

I've studied reconstructions of that house, photographs of the street, paintings of the rooms and the surrounding areas. I can see each detail of each room in that house. I can see the artists come to life in my mind, and I hate Paul Gauguin. He is grandiosely belligerent, and his self-absorption makes me sick. The way he treats van Gogh, looks down on him, expects him to abandon his own philosophies about painting makes me wish he had fallen into obscurity.

But alas, he has not.

By the time I had finished wrapping my prehensile brain around the content of the painting, I was physically and mentally exhausted. When I realized how long I had been standing there staring at it, I turned around and noticed that a group of people had gathered behind me, probably waiting for me to get the hell out of the way, so they, too, could experience a van Gogh, and I was embarrassed by my selfish monopoly of the immediate viewing area.

But I doubt they saw what I saw.

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