PROVENCE

THROUGH THE EYES OF VAN GOGH

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My dear sister,

If I didn’t write to you quickly this Sunday morning while the canvases I’ve begun are drying a little in the sun, I would wait even longer to answer your kind letter.

I’ve just finished a landscape of an olive grove with grey foliage more or less like that of the willows, their cast shadows violet on the sun-drenched sand. Then yet another that depicts a field of yellowing wheat surrounded by brambles and green bushes. At the end of the field a little pink house with a tall and dark cypress tree that stands out against the distant purplish and bluish hills, and against a forget-me-not blue sky streaked with pink whose pure tones contrast with the already heavy, scorched ears, whose tones are as warm as the crust of a loaf of bread.

I have yet another in which a field of wheat on the slope of the hills is completely ravaged and knocked to the ground by a downpour, and which is drenched by the torrential shower.

From: Vincent van Gogh
To: Willemien van Gogh
Date: 16 June 1889

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From: Vincent van Gogh
To: Willemien van Gogh
Date: Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Tuesday, 2 July 1889

My dear sister,

In recent days I already began another letter in reply to yours, but I became aware that I didn’t have sufficient mastery of my mind to write.

I’m quite absorbed in reading the Shakespeare that Theo sent me here, where at last I’ll have the calm necessary to do a little more difficult reading. I’ve first taken the kings series, of which I’ve already read Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and a part of Henry VI – as these dramas were the most unfamiliar to me. Have you ever read King Lear? But anyway, I think I shan’t urge you too much to read such dramatic books when I myself, returning from this reading, am always obliged to go and gaze at a blade of grass, a pine-tree branch, an ear of wheat, to calm myself.

So if you want to do as artists do, gaze upon the white and red poppies with the bluish leaves, with those buds raising themselves up on stems with gracious curves. The hours of trouble and battle will assuredly come and find us without our going to look for them.

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Dear Mother,

If you say that you’re a mother approaching 70 then it must be true, but one would certainly not tell it from your writing, for it struck me that it’s exceptionally firm

It occurs to me that in the summer here it’s not much hotter than at home as regards being bothered by it, since the air here is clearer and purer. What’s more, we very often have a strong wind, the mistral. I’ve painted in the wheatfields during the hottest part of the day without it bothering me much. But one can sometimes see that the sun can be quite strong from the way the wheat turns yellow quickly.

There are very beautiful fields of olive trees here, which are grey and silvery in leaf like pollard willows. 

Then I never tire of the blue sky. One never sees buckwheat or rapeseed here, and generally speaking there’s rather less variety than at home. And I’d so much like to paint a field of buckwheat in flower or rapeseed in flower, or flax. But I’ll probably find the opportunity to do it later in Normandy or Brittany. Then here one also never sees the mossy peasant roofs on the barns or cottages like at home, and no oak coppices and no spurry and no beech hedges with their red-brown leaves and whitish tangled old stems.

Also no proper heathland and no birches, which were so beautiful in Nuenen.

But what are beautiful in the south are the vineyards, where they’re on the flat land or the hillsides. I’ve seen it, and come to that sent Theo a painting of it, where a vineyard is all purple, crimson and yellow and green and violet like the Virginia creeper in Holland. I like to see a vineyard as much as a wheatfield. Then the hills here, full of thyme and other aromatic plants, are very beautiful, and because of the clarity of the air one can see from the heights so much further than at home.

From: Vincent van Gogh
To: Anna van Gogh-Carbentus
Date: approx. 8 - 12 July 1889

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PINK WATER

SALIN D'AIGUES MORTES

[ salty pink fields ]

...

salt lakes

bordered like fields

grazed by flamingos

the harvest is pink.

.

off in the distance

lit by a mediterranean sun

a castle sits, watching over this

rosy dominion.

.

the coffers are full

mountains of riches

white and gleaming

raked ashore by the men in tall boots.

.

water runs in and out

through channels

gates and sluices

it is hard work, in these fields.

.

but the real worker is a tiny algae

 - halophilic...

it drinks in the sunlight

and by some alchemical process

akin to the green grass

it turns those energies

pink!

.

and when all is quiet

the wind but a whisper

there blooms on the surface

of all the pink fields

a kind of salt flower...

'fleur de sel'

...

PREHISTORIC HANDS

I fell in love in a dark cave of curving walls and undulations and torchlit creations. It was still early morning, perhaps only 9am, but in the cave there were no indications of the day - time had ceased to exist, this far back in the cracks of inner Earth.

Oliver and I had waited in a light drizzle of rain at a picnic bench for the doors to open to Font de Gaume. I remember feeling a little dizzy at the thought of viewing the art of human hands that lived over 15,000 years ago. I had read somewhere that seeing prehistoric art is like aging a fine wine - the flavors and impressions deepen with time in the minds of those who see it.

Thirty minutes later, we were joined by several other adventurous souls. I think we all felt very lucky standing there, pensive and quiet, waiting at the entrance of the cave. Font de Gaume is the last cave with original, polychromatic paintings that is still open to the public, and the numbers of visitors allowed in become more restricted every year, with increasing talk of closing the cave. Our breath is potent, in places of such fragile and ancient beauty. The pollen, dirt and dust that we carry with us so conveniently in the outside world, is actually quite damaging inside the cave. And the flash of a camera can hasten the fading of prehistoric pigments. This time-wearing is natural, everything must eventually change and pass, but I can understand the anxious desires of scientists to preserve something so incredible. I left my camera in the car, taking only my bare hands, seeing eyes, and body clothed in thin, waterproof layers. I almost felt naked without the camera, as if there was nothing between me and those paintings.

That cave is imprinted in my memory.
I revisit it now, forming pictures into words...

Where there is now a narrow, chiseled path, feet once climbed over rocky formations, bodies squeezed through tiny cracks, to emerge into a dark womb-chamber. At first the darkness blinds the edges of my vision, but slowly, as my eyes follow the guiding light of one tiny torch, I begin to see.

I see, on the wall in front of me a great bison, his body formed of a red pigment, scattered across the wall as if it was blown there by a harsh wind. His belly is round and full with the shape of the rock, and his back and chest follow the lines of the jagged protrusion on which he stands. Further back, hidden in a hollow, there is the outline of a human hand. Some-body, a person, a living being with hands like you or I placed their palm, fingers spread, on the rock and then, putting pigment in their mouth, they blew gently across their own hand to trace its outline. I remembered a discussion in archaeology class of this very technique, and how many prehistoric hands were revisited over hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, painted over again and again. It is so human, to place one's own hand over an imprint of another, as if we are connecting through touch...

“For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.”

— JULIET - Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Then there are the reindeer: a male and a female. The male, he is standing, leaning forward towards the smaller female. She is kneeling. And in the light, directed by the gentle tone of our French guide, we can see one tiny tongue, not painted, but carved from the very rock... he is leaning in to tenderly lick her forehead. It is a moment of pure affection, so intimate, captured in the eyes and heart of a person who lived and breathed the natural world.

The evidence of attention was everywhere. At one point I began to cry. I could honestly feel the layers shedding from me in front of these devotional pictures that revealed the true nature of life: all connections, all interactions. I felt it again, later that day, in the replicas of Lascaux cave. So tangible, almost touchable - the web of connections, the mystery and special meaning found in life by observant, thoughtful and reflective beings.

Picasso has often been erroneously quoted as saying "we have invented nothing," after visiting Lascaux cave. Although the source is dubious, the words themselves speak volumes. None of the paintings I saw that day seemed the work of 'primitive' hands. These were not pictures of lesser skill or meaning or thought. There, everywhere, was the evidence of an artistry that goes beyond my own reckoning.

The shapes of the animals move with the walls, as if they are flowing, moving in the dark. The artists would have painted in the light of tiny oil lamps; adding to their pictures over time, perhaps on rainy days. Here and there, a missing bison body part is made up by the shape of the flowstone - a belly filled out by flickering shadows, and eyes left blank to reveal a small knarled calcite pip. Perhaps the missing legs of a horse were formed through shadow puppetry. The animals are placed into groups that imitate real life -  bison-horses-lions, and aurochs-horses-deer-bears are shown frequently together, while bison-aurochs-ibex are not shown side by side. It seems the artists were respecting the natural environment of each animal, as bison and lions live in open plains; aurochs, deer and bears live in forests and marshes, the ibex in rocky areas, and horses live in all. In some areas the animals seem highly animated - legs raised, bodies twisted or poised midair, multiple heads or legs showing a movement through various postures. To create this kind of art, one would need a depth of perception, observation and vision that is hardly rivaled in the world of art today! Each animal is made of sinuous line and graduated, careful application of colour, or remissions of it. Like a quick sketch, the general forms are captured, but something else is there too - a spirit, or essence. The walls breath, the creatures herd and prance and thunder and leap and fall. They move.

...

I had taken no pictures in Font de Gaume, but I snapped a few of Lascaux's replicas with the intent to simply remember. I remember the hundreds of bison, and stags, and horses, and cattle, a rhinocerous, a bird, a bear, and one human. That one human... located at the bottom of a large hole, he had the face of a bird. I know we will never fully understand the intent of the artists, but it was the most beautiful of all the mysteries, this depiction of man seeing himself. Although there are tens of thousands of animals shown in cave paintings around the world, the number of human depictions is very small. Perhaps it was taboo to paint such a thing - and that is why this one little bird man was painted in secret at the bottom of a hole. But then I thought of how the world must have looked to a human in those times. The human population was still small, and the world was vast and filled with animals! This was not a human-centric place, like the Earth we see today. A person living then would have seen far more of the outside world.

The animals in Lascaux are painted almost lovingly - large beasts full of power; animated and spirited.

There, too, were many small and strange symbols. Dots in rows of three, forming groups of six, found at the places where the cave ended. Squares that were divided into four, each part coloured with a different pigment. Small x symbols, along with lines, like Roman numerals. And a series of circles looking like little moons on a calendar.

It has been almost one year since I visited those caves, and the impression they left upon me has ripened like fruit on a tree limb - the blossom of awe I once felt is now full, deep and rich, and I cannot help but shed a few tears as I edit my words here.

I fell in love all over again that day. I fell in love with humanity.