Impressionism of Life

Van Gogh’s Color

Last November, my job took me to Amsterdam to visit a research group at one of the world’s largest cancer institutes. On my last day in this old European city, I had a couple of spare hours to be a tourist, so I endeavored to my one and only tourism goal – to visit the Van Gogh Museum .

Since childhood, the artist Vincent Van Gogh has been around my life in one form or another. First of all, my parents had a print of “The Starry Night,” the famous swirling vision of warm orange stars over a dark blue landscape. Second, an ever popular vinyl music album in our house was one by Don MacLean. It featured a song called “Vincent” and started out with the lyrics Starry, starry night… Third, we used to play a board game called “Masterpiece” that had famous paintings printed on the playing cards. One of those cards was a Van Gogh self-portrait, and I remembered it well because it would always bring up the story of the artist cutting his own ear off. The idea of a man cutting his own ear off fascinated me (as it would any kid, I imagine). So that is how I got to know Vincent Van Gogh, and hence my course to visit the Van Gogh Museum .

The museum was pretty impressive. Surprisingly, I found myself most interested in how the man’s life was revealed through a history of letter correspondence that he had shared with his brother. Periods of his life that were subtly told in the mood of his paintings could be matched with his personal letters of the same times. These written words gave a third dimension to the paintings, a dimension you could feel without touching or seeing. I wandered around the museum walls, stopping here and there to look or read. What I didn’t find, however, was “The Starry Night.” I figured it would be the headline painting of the whole museum, and displayed prominently somewhere. But as it turned out, this painting was on tour at the time, borrowed by an art museum in either Tokyo or Prague , which one I don’t remember.

With that slight setback in plans, I had to admit to myself that I had rushed through many of the paintings in anticipation of the one I knew so well. So, wanting to be a diligent tourist of course, I set back upstairs to revisit one section of the museum that I had enjoyed the first time around, albeit quickly. It was a section of landscapes, one of the most colorful sections of the museum. I honed in on one in particular, just to get close, to see the texture – the dabs of paint and how they lived on the canvas. What I saw was very surprising.

On this painting in particular, which was so colorful and admirable from a few steps back, I could see big chunks of hard, dark paint when I looked in closer. There was a background of sadness and trouble that this painting was dealing with. Yet, it wasn’t a sad painting; it was a great painting in fact. Over the troubled background, you see, were these wonderful dots and curls and swirls and wisps of color. And from a few steps back, it was the arrangement of this color that made the painting. My eyes could see the dark if they tried to, but my heart saw the painting, through the color, for what it really was. And, needless to say, the color would not have stood out as beautifully were it not for the darkness it had conquered.

The Miracles

Back in St. Louis , about three months later, I had the distinct honor to meet three women: Debie, Susan, and Sharon. I was introduced to these women through my friend Laverne, of whom I had asked a favor weeks earlier. You see, I wanted to put together a “Cancer Survivor Panel” as a program at work. I work in the field of radiation therapy, designing ways for technology to help treat cancer, and I thought it was very important to let my friends at work see that their jobs really did matter. Somehow I knew that Laverne, being very active in the Optimist Club and at her church, could help me find a few willing speakers. Well, did she ever! She found three women, all from Kirkwood Baptist Church , who would become part of one of the neatest hours I have ever witnessed at work.

Debie, Susan, and Sharon are beautiful women. They have all experienced cancer, each a different type and each in completely different circumstances, but sisters to the experience nonetheless. Two nights before the program, I sat with them for three hours at a restaurant in Kirkwood . I quickly knew that this would be a powerful program, as the stories started to naturally flow and paint their own unique pictures. I jotted some notes as they remembered together. We talked, just laughing and listening and knowing that we were about to be part of something special.

The day of the program, for me, deserves and will get a writing of its own. For now, let me just say that people’s spirits were touched that day – the speakers and the listeners, and mine. Genuine tears flowed both ways, not sad ones at all, but rather tears that welled up from the heart and made us feel whole. What had happened in the lives of these women, and what they shared with us that day, were miracles of the Spirit. And the words that came out of their lives and into ours awoke that other dimension, the dimension of the heart.

The faith and bravery of Debie, Susan, and Sharon were real miracles that I witnessed that day. So too was the standing ovation of the packed audience.

Impressionism

The night I met my three new friends for dinner to prepare for the program, I had grabbed my little moleskin notebook to bring with me to take notes. I opened it up to find the first blank page, and I realized that the last page of scribbles was from my flight back from Amsterdam two months earlier. It was a poem I had written about the painting at the Van Gogh Museum .

Impressionist painters, of whom Van Gogh was one of the most famous, try to capture a feeling of a moment, not with detail, but rather with color. You see, if you try to capture a distinct moment in a painting, you quickly discover that the light is always changing, and thus so is the image. You can neither stop nor catch the light, you can only experience it and appreciate it. Van Gogh did this with the swirls and wisps of color that sat humbly but triumphantly above the dark.

My three new friends, through the body’s cancer, each know the experience of the hard and dark paints. But the color and the light of their true spirits shine brighter because of it. Truly, this is a miracle.

You see, this is how God paints.