Seeing Vincent
© Will South, January 11, 2020
Our eyes are magical. Small, round, and watery nerve-filled windows out onto space, they operate in tandem with our bodies to organize the maze of experience around us. We call what we see “reality,” and what we see constantly changes with ever-shifting light.
Helping others to see art has been my vocation for well over thirty years. Images are right there in front of us, and yet they are not. A painting of an empty field topped with a simple blue sky is easily passed by. My job has been to get museum visitors to stop and meditate upon that empty field.
Looking is not enough. One must listen to a painting. Hear the silence of that empty sky, hear the gentle rush of wind through the wind-bent wheat. Hear the dashes of cadmium-red roses singing at the crest of the hill, next to emerald trees that very nearly dance beneath the fast moving clouds. This is an efflorescent world, a world in motion, a world to explore, a world you are woven into with myriad colored thread. Yes, our eyes are evolutionary miracles, yet an experience of anything requires our entire being—our ability to touch, smell, feel, remember and imagine.
Even without eyes, art may speak to you. The last exhibition tour of my career was shared with just one person, the poet Ann Humphries. Ann is blind. And as we walked through Van Gogh and His Inspirations for nearly two hours, focused on the dozen works by Vincent, sensation and emotion roiled inside her—I felt her trembling thoughts through her hands that held on to me among the crowds.
Ann had written me a gentle email, asking if I remembered her. Of course, poets guide my life, I reminded her. Was there, she asked, any tactile part of the show—things she might touch? No, I slowly replied with an instant sense of failure: my show was not fully accessible. I rallied quickly: Ann, might I walk you through the exhibition as my guest? She did not wish for special treatment, I gathered, but by the next day decided to accept the invitation, happily.
It occurred to me that in over thirty years of public speaking, I had never given a tour to the blind. My last tour would be a first. Another first was that I had exactly no idea what I would say.
Once in front of the first Van Gogh, our journey designed itself. Ann moved her hands over my arm, and asked how far we were from the surface that Vincent had created. I took one hand, and stretched it to the edge of the frame. Nearby security guards looked on, as did a wall of people behind us, suddenly still and staring at the sight of us. I then moved both of her hands to indicate how wide the painting is, and then again for how high.
“Now, tell me what is there,” she said ever so softly. This, I knew, was the challenge of a lifetime. One I had not seen coming. What is there, in a landscape by Van Gogh? Did I even really know?
I started with telling Ann that this particular painting is more traditional and conservative than the more famous late paintings like Starry Night and Wheatfield with Crows. This painting begins in the foreground with a field of hyacinth moving in carefully measured geometric rows of blue, yellow, white and red. None of these colors, though, are really just that—each is shot through with the rich sepia-colored earth below making the blue slouch toward a tender blue-violet; the reds vacillated between a ruddy carmine and a warm pink; the yellows wished to be gold, but settled for a muted ochre. The white rows of flowers were the brightest part of the canvas, shimmering like low cotton. In these colors, you felt the soil between your fingers.
In this expansive foreground of flowers was a tiny figure near the middle-ground of the painting. He is walking through the rows, clearly the gardener focused on his work. He is alone, but with purpose, and that purpose is his garden. This is not a person you could speak to in this moment—he is busy, and far from you. Fate has made him a stranger.
Behind him are a row of buildings, tobacco-juice brown under a sky filled with tawny clouds. Naked trees line the space between the buildings, leafless and cold. This could be late autumn, perhaps the last of the blooming season.
The air feels cold in this image, the clouds heavy, the buildings mute behind the colored field. In this overwhelming quiet place, work goes on. The sky is changing. The colors strain to be more bold, but are not. Though, they take on vibrancy by contrast with the limp, dark brown sienna trees and house-tops. The scene at first blush is picture-perfect and postcard worthy, but as we stand there, and as we converse—me describing, she asking questions—we both see this is a picture busy becoming tomorrow. The work will get done, the flowers will fade, the clouds will disperse. Take this all in, now.
Ann asks me how wide the brush strokes seem to be. Perhaps an eighth inch flat-tipped brush I guess, with a softer and somewhat larger brush evident in the sky. And the weight of his hand? Confident and fluid in the sky, I tell her. Precise and pushing the hyacinth bulbs into place, giving each an equal hand. The trees are fragile, the buildings thick and ordinary. Each character in this play has his and her own costume, Vincent knows that. The well-ordered garden, so well maintained and attractive, is at odds with the random clouds that say nature is really untamed. The garden and the sky stay in their own realms.
Visitors to the show gather around us. They see she is blind. They listen to us, and their eyes flicker back and forth between us and the Van Gogh landscape. Three small girls stare, in awe. “He is helping her see,” their mother whispers. I want to say that it is clearly the other way around, but do not. People are taking pictures of us, we’ll be on Instagram within moments. What are these visitors seeing?
That looking takes a life, a full life. It takes having been places, having loved others. It takes desire, it takes regret and failure. It takes finding words that only barely scratch the surface of what you so desperately need to say. It takes sleep and dreams, and waking up in an equally dreamlike world. They are watching a blind poet see, and it is something so dramatic, so utterly unexpected, as if a purple cow had just run through the gallery.
A woman embraces Ann, and tells her of a blind relative. This visitor says to me that my description of the painting made it come alive right in front of her. She tingled. Another man says that he can’t see like us. Why not? You are working on seeing right now, I tell him. I’m so glad, and hope you come to every show. He will, he says. His life has been transformed right then and there.
Ann is happy. I am not only happy, but honored. I came to help a poet to see a painter, and it was I who had his eyes opened wide.