many touches but
couldn’t care less what the colours
are in reality
From the review, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers review – a riveting rollercoaster ride from Arles to the stars by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian, September, 10, 2024.
A review of the show, Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, at the National Gallery, London, that opens September and I will never see.
Mr. Jones writes, “He’d toiled for years doing brown studies of northern life before he met the avant garde in Paris: within weeks of his arrival in Arles, he took the impressionist ideas he’d encountered to the next level. Describing his painting of a man sowing, he wrote in June 1888: “There are many touches of yellow in the soil … but I couldn’t care less what the colours are in reality.”“
I have seen so few Van Gogh’s in person but I can testify to the impact of the power of the artist that can be felt standing in front of painting, knowing you have to be in the same space the artist once stood and the world the artist attempted to record on canvas.
As Mr. Jones states: “Reality is not real. The visionary is.”
I like that.
I like that a lot.
Reality is not real.
The visionary is.
When Mr. Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” he wasn’t, as we know, describing the world of Colonial America as it then existed.
Not all men, mankind were equal.
It wasn’t the reality.
It was a vision.
A vision we are still too far from after almost 250 years but the vision, for a lot of us, is still there.
Which, I guess, makes us the visionary.
Reality is not real.
The visionary is.
That is the reality of it all.
Mr. Jones closes his review with this.
We all know how badly it ended. The ideals Van Gogh invested in his little home couldn’t withstand the shock of sharing it with Gauguin, and after his ear-cutting and further crises he decided he was better off in an asylum. But here, that never happens. We experience not the sordid facts, but Van Gogh’s dream of The Yellow House. It still exists, always, out there among the painted stars.
It still exists, always, out there among the painted stars.
No Haiku For You 