Speaking of birthdays, today happens to be Vincent Van Gogh's 155th birthday. Though he died in heart-breaking obscurity and depression, the inner light and darkness that radiates from his best work suggests a deeply spiritual way of seeing the world. In honor of his birthday today, I offer these few interesting notes about Vincent Van Gogh:
1. Van Gogh was profoundly discontent and unsuccessful in his formal artistic training, and he butted with many heads as he struggled to escape the "flat, insipid" results of the Academy's formalized, systematic method. Here's an excerpt from a letter he wrote to his brother Theodore:
I must tell you that even though I continue to attend, the pedantry of those fellows at the [Arts] Academy is often quite unbearable and they seem hateful to me at times. But I try very hard to avoid arguments with them and go my own way. I feel like I am getting closer to what I am looking for [in my art] and perhaps I will find it sooner if I can do what I want to do when I draw those plaster reproductions. ... You can’t imagine how flat, insipid and lifeless the results of [their] system are; I must say that I am content to have seen the thing up close. ... I have wanted to say twenty five times, “Your outline is a trick.” But it doesn’t seem worth fighting about. And yet even when I keep silent, they irritate me and I irritate them.
2. I've heard some speculation that Vincent Van Gogh may have had a visual disorder that affected the way he perceived and processed light, making yellow light especially glaring to his eyes. This would account for the unusually vivid, sometimes ugly use of yellow in his work. (Some have speculated similarly that his vision was affected by the use of digitalis, a drug prescribed for epilepsy, though there is little evidence he ever took the drug.)
3. I often think about Vincent Van Gogh when I reflect on what it means to be a pastor-as-artist, or an artist-as-pastor. It's not well known, but before embarking on his career as a painter, Vincent Van Gogh studied for the ministry, and sought (unsuccessfully) to be a pastor. I guess this kind of biographical detail gets overshadowed when you cut off your ear. I've heard it said that he failed at his studies because he took Jesus' teaching too close to heart and "sold all he had to give to the poor." His instructors felt he was too "radical." But when I think about the deeply spiritual response his work has often evoked in people over the last century and a half, I wonder: maybe, by asking people to look through the surface of things for the light behind, maybe he ministered to more people than he would have as a Methodist preacher.
Don McLean put it well: "Starry, starry night, paint your palette blue and grey, / Look out on a summer's day, with eyes that know the darkness of my soul."
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