Provence, Van Gogh, and the Theme That Won’t Leave Me Alone

In the summer of 2017, my husband and I visited the south of France. It was one of our favorite itineraries ever and included Gordes, Antibes, Eze, Cote d’Azur, the whole shebang. Visiting Saint-Remy-de-Provence, sometimes referred to as the Saint-Paul asylum, where Vincent Van Gogh lived for a year from 1889 to 1890, was high on the must-do list.

My first memory of “working” with pastels was at age nine, when I was obsessed with trying to depict the artist cutting off his own ear. In beautiful, bright colors, I tried and tried with the messy medium, but to no (acceptable) avail. And yes, I was an interesting child.

When I was 18, backpacking across Europe, I saw his work in person for the first time in Amsterdam. I stood, scarcely showered, I’m sure, his work surrounding me, and wept. Writing this, I still tear up thinking about the utterly profound experience.

So, you can imagine how much I was looking forward to this visit. Yet still, for someone long enamored with his work, it surpassed all of my expectations. The beauty of the landscape was part of it, lavender fields surrounding it on nearly every side. Most poignant was that it continues to be a working hospital today, serving women with mental illness and using art therapy as one of its main modes of treatment. You can purchase their stunning artwork in the shop there, and we bought two paintings for upcoming wedding gifts and two that are in our home.

But I think what stood out most was information I never quite understood about the artist, and that is that the majority of his most famous paintings were painted while confined in the countryside mental institution. This includes Starry Night, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (too bad I wasn’t there to help him with that one), Irises, and Wheatfield with Cypresses (a personal favorite), among others. At arguably the darkest time of his life, he created the most beauty.

The greater the light, the larger the shadow. Different sides of the same coin. It’s not either/or; it’s both/and. Greatest strength, greatest weakness.

This theme, in its various idioms, won’t leave me alone. I ponder it. In others, I see it. I am it. Science would say it’s possibly the deepest reality of the universe. And yet it seems nearly impossible for us to deeply accept (of ourselves or others), not to mention embrace it. I struggle with it as much as anyone, so often failing to see that the thing I often want to change about my spouse or children or co-workers is the corresponding side of what I adore in them.

For me, just the reminder can help. The pause, when I can find it, is to ask myself what the flipside of a person’s “coin” might be. Maybe to hold them together means to make way for more Starry Nights. As Carl Jung insisted, “The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.”

Sounds about right.