Wheat Field With Crows – 1890 – Oil on Canvas – 50.5 x 103cm – :: Image – Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Vincent Van Gogh created most of his work over a ten-year period — all of those amazing pieces, including his stylistic transitions, within a single decade. Not to mention that a huge hunk of his most famous works were created within his last year, like Starry Night. I didn’t remember those facts from my art history classes in college, but I read it on a gallery didactic panel and in a gift shop book. I’ve been a fan of his for most of my life. My parents bought me a monograph of his work either for Christmas, or my birthday, when I was in seventh grade. I don’t remember if they did because I’d mentioned him, or if they wanted to introduce me to his work. Either way, the book was inspirational and shocking, not because it mentioned the story of his bandaged ear, or because of his emotional struggles, but because he painted wheat and wheat fields, and wrote about wheat fields. I understood wheat fields.
Almost forty-five years later just a week before Christmas, my wife and I left for the Van Gogh Museum from our rented apartment in Amsterdam. It was a cool, gray, drizzling day. We walked next to and over the canals which reminded me of the movie Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates, my friend who we visited the previous day in Leiden, and our graduate school professor Benno who was a founding member of Total Design. Dreamy Dutch architecture, thoughtful design, bread and cheese bathed in the honey light of deli storefronts, and bicyclists were everywhere. I’d imagined visiting Amsterdam and the Van Gogh Museum for a long time, but I didn’t imagine that it would feel this good.
It was off-season and the museum was still busy — not crowded, but busy. Sometimes we’d need to take our turn to stand in front of certain works, like the The Potato Eaters, Sunflowers, or Wheat Field With Crows. It’s hard to remember the full experience because I was in a blissful travel haze. There’s a lot to absorb, process, and make sense of in the museum, down to the texture of his paint and which brush strokes are underneath and which are on top. I could almost imagine him painting the canvas, or stabbing at it, depending on his mood.
Seeing his work in person, along with the other Impressionists whose paintings, drawings, and stories are also exhibited, placed all of it in a bigger social and historical context, like a giant afternoon seminar. My art history knowledge is average at best, so being able to view his work in person, with so much information available, explaining who he was, and what he was responding to in his life was overwhelming. We wandered through the museum for hours before finally needing to leave and find a place to eat a late lunch, grab our luggage, take a train to the airport, and catch a plane to Italy where we were meeting our daughter. In one of the final galleries, I came across a few of his paintings that felt similar and looked to be part of a series. All of them were landscapes that focused mostly on wheat fields. As I alternated between sitting on a gallery bench in front of them, and standing as close as I could to inspect their surfaces, I slowly remembered that my most recent painting sitting on my easel back home, unfinished, was about the view of a wheat field through the moving curtains of a farmhouse window. I got goosebumps and then felt even more connected as I saw my wife strolling by Sunflowers hanging on a deep blue wall in slow motion.
For Jeenee and Seeley
Songs :: Amsterdam by Mary Gauthier, Solo by Hanah,
© C. Davidson