Through the old I wanted to confirm the rightness of the new.
-Helene Kruller-Muller, describing her collection of impressionist, neo-impressionist and cubist art

Wheat Field with Sun and Cloud,
Van Gogh, 1889

Van Gogh believed that drawings, in and of themselves, could be as complex and as deeply satisfying as a painting. To him, his drawings, which he did with raw “mountain charcoal”, were not just studies for a larger project, but complete pieces with carefully crafted strokes. This one was painted through the bars of the asylum; I believe it was on his first stay there. The first thing one notices is the sun, cold and bright, extending its rays like a hand with fingers spread wide. Next you take in the wheat field, demarcated by arching lines of brown or grey, or just the negative space between the strokes giving life to the wind bent strands. Alone these two elements are enough to make a striking drawing. But if you wait with the images a moment more, you see another. A windblown path parts the wheat through the middle and slightly to the right, and there, if you follow it you see a third dark portion of this piece. There is a deep shadow far off behind the wheat field, its source a dark cloud gathering in the middle distance. This is what I wrote in my pocket journal when I saw this juxtaposition, this thing which made my heart rise high into my chest, then just as quickly tightened my throat:

This is the dark core of sadness embedded in the day, caught between the glare of the sun and the gathering rush of an impending storm. This is the feeling when one is, perhaps, emerging from depression, when one is, just possibly, rising up from the dark into the light. Then again, whispers the doubt, perhaps one is only seeing the cold light briefly, and it will never become all the way warm. No, that might be foreshortened, because you see, perhaps one is coming into the light, or perhaps it is just a pause before you are drawn again down the path that takes you back into the center of the storm, into the still dark core in the distance.

Olive Garden
Van Gogh, 1889

Here Van Gogh is allowed outside the walls of his asylum. He paints olive trees. Unlike his other paintings of olive groves, which were meditations on Christ’s prayers in the garden and therefore tinted with solitude and sorrow, this painting is subtly jubilant, a virtual dance of leaf and branch. The brush strokes here curve upwards. They sweep. It looks as though God has deeply inhaled, drawing all things up and way from earth towards the warmth of his nostrils.
“Vincent.” He always used his first name. He wanted to be well received, for his work to be accessible, you see, but “Van Gogh?” Well, it was wildly unpronounceable. Unless you have heard a Dutchman speak it you’ve probably never heard it formed correctly. So it was always just “Vincent.” Simple. Recognizable. Accessible. Here, in the olive grove, his name is signed with the same upward curve that encompasses the whole scene. It is like the onsided curve of a sly mouth – a wistful, hopeful turn of fortune.