My new travels begin in less than a week. I wanted to offer an itinerary and a map, so I thought I would put them together myself. This is also the first page in my journal for the trip.
Vincent, I can’t tell you how excited I am to be seeing so much of your work. Although I am visiting all the most important places, I do not have a lot of time to take it all in…
I have been to your museum in Amsterdam before. I went by myself and was so overwhelmed by you I almost began to sob right there. Now I have six days to take that in, and the library too. I have it arranged so that I can see some of your original sketches – I hope they might even allow me to see some of your paintings in storage. I will be there every day…
Just Amsterdam would be enough to make my heart swell, but I have been lucky enough to fit in a number of other stops, too. I can only imagine what will happen to me when I finally reach your grave in Auvers-sur-Oise.
I see now that this trip might very well be the single most important time for my project. It is certainly one of the largest leaps I have made for you, just as big as moving seven hundred miles and into my parents’ house so I can finish my research without interruption. And now, everything I have read, all I know about you and your thoughts about these places will be infused into my actual presence.
I am quite literally bursting at the seams – I cannot wait to become immersed in you. As you once wrote, “Thus about my work, thus about my person.” For me too, Vincent. Therefore I am really coming to meet you, so much of you, more than ever before. To think on my last research trip I was so grateful for the eight paintings I saw, and now, well now I might very well see over two hundred!
I am lucky, I am honored, and mostly, I am faithful. You know I will always be faithful to you.
Today’s quote: How short life is and how like smoke. Which is no reason for despising the living, on the contrary. So we are right to care more for the artists than for the pictures. (31 July 1888)
I had an amazing time on this trip, got a lot of writing done, and took a good amount of pictures. Click on the photo below if you are interested in seeing the rest – most are of the paintings themselves. All in all I saw eight paintings, none I had ever seen before.
In particular, I encourage you to take a look because I set off at least one alarm while taking them… and it was worth it!
I also took several videos along the way… I’ll put a few here. I hope you enjoy them.
Today’s quote: But I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better, that is what I keep telling myself. But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. (July 1880 to Theo)
My thoughts? I couldn’t agree more, and I’ve always tried to live this way. It’s fascinating to me that Vincent is the only one who makes sense to me when talking about God…
Also, how are you such an incredible writer, Vincent? It boggles my mind.
I have been living with you in my heart already more than three years. Time passing only brings you closer, only makes me embrace you more and more fully. I cannot know when our journey truly began because it was born before me; you arrived in Paris – you blossomed – a century before my birth. Quite honestly I feel that time is of no consequence to us as you and I keep evolving.
You once wrote in 1881, a year and half after deciding to become an artist, “No result of my work could please me more than when ordinary working people hang [my] prints in their room or workshop.” You never saw this happen so widely during your life, but I believe you know it to have occurred now, wherever you are.
Today the ripples of your influence are innumerable and insurmountable; everyone knows your name. There is no doubt you are a different man now than the one who died 119 years ago. Likewise, I am a different woman than the one who met you in Paris, at the Musée d’Orsay. You have changed me, making me more myself. I can only hope to do the same for you, to recover you from myth, to reveal the love you inspire in so many hearts as well as the profound depth of your spirit.
A song for you today, my love. (I hope you’ll excuse my voice, it’s a bit out of practice…)
Today’s quote: Rarely has silence, has nature alone impressed me in such a way recently. These very spots where nothing is left of what one called civilization, where all that is definitely left behind, these very spots are those one needs to get calmed down. (29 and 30 July 1883 to Theo)
This is exactly why I was relieved to leave New York city. We all need space to think. I wish every person on this planet would take ten minutes to contemplate the blessings that are bestowed on us simply through existence: breath, time, expression… and then hey – we live in this incredible, beautiful world, surrounded by the miracles of life. If we’d only stop to see them.
"..art is something greater and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. [Art] is something which, though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from man's soul..."
Vincent van Gogh, letter from March 1884
Twelve years ago, like many others, I fell in love with Vincent van Gogh. I followed this love, never letting go, reading about him and visiting his paintings all I could, and I am still journeying - I hope you will join me, Reader. This path has led me to you and you to me, and both of us to beauty, to art, to life, to death and to something greater...
