| This is an essay I wrote for a graduate school I'm applying to. It is about a painting Vincent Van Gogh painted called Yellow Wheat and Cypresses. The essay discusses how the painter and his work displays God to me through the mediums of Text, Soul, and Culture. Don't copy it for school or anything. Just read it if you have a few minutes. I hope you like it. I hope I did justice to Vincent's work. Maybe it will make it up to him; that he lost his ear and all. On a hazily sunny mid-week August morning, with no time cards to punch and the days of summer going the way of the vagrant, one easily feels the incessant urge to travel. The pavement, worn and feeling somewhat squashed, exhorts us to give it rubber hugs and kisses. On a morning such as this, I had a destination in sight and the Art Institute of Chicago humbly claimed such an honor. Black coffee turned tannishly brown and forced to be sweet swam into my stomach and gave the necessary energy for a journey which would come full circle by the time the sky turned sable-blue. The museum afforded me the opportunity of meeting Vincent Van Gogh and his vivid, poignant depictions of life; life seen through mixtures of colors so real they bleed. It was at this institute of splendor that culture changed me, interacting with my soul through the medium of an unwritten text compiled by a man consciously or unconsciously aware that he would someday act as an illuminator of the heavens. Being a resident of a Midwestern city, Chicago isn’t a stranger and locating free parking in a cozy, leafy-tree lined street with ivy-covered brick apartments is not out of the question. Parking was conveniently discovered a few blocks away from public transportation – the El, Chicago’s delightful way of discovering all it has to offer. The train ride is filled with solemn, somber denizens of a single city breathing breath from a multitude of cultures. Black, brown, white, and yellow aren’t so different caged in a box. Harmoniously similar to the work of Van Gogh, the colors beautifully mesh together. There is community even if it isn’t acknowledged, even if it’s forced. Sundry languages sound through the train, letters and syllables mix and mingle and dance creating a song of life. We arrived at the Art Institute. Walls and halls filled to capacity with artwork, occupants weaving through creamishly-white walled rooms, slip-sliding along brown potato colored planks. The light was soft and inoffensive. I simply walked from room to room. Of all the art work, Van Gogh’s work was most vivid – it refused to be seen on the surface; it intermingled with its viewers on a much deeper, more profound level. Van Gogh hinted at something mysterious, displaying what I attribute to be the splendor and beauty of God through a medium with a brush on a canvas covered in paint delivered down from above. Before this day, canvas was a surface I had never allowed God to dance upon. His painting The Bedroom provided respite while seemingly sealing my eyelids in brick; for after seeing his messy quarters, I yearned to jump through canvas and slip under the red covers, rubbing my feet amongst the moldy greenish-brown wood floor. His self-portraits brought sadness and wonder to my heart. But it was another painting which illuminated the words of a prophet spoken more than a few thousand years prior. The text printed without words that lucidly transcribed thoughts and images of God happened to involve an evergreen tree, a field of grain, and a sky so blue it sounded of music. The text was Van Gogh’s Yellow Wheat and Cypresses. The dark green seemingly black nettles that dress the branches of the giant cypress tree reach with all of their might towards the heavens. The golden burnt yellow of the wheat appears to be the grass of heaven. The clouds, hazy white and lazy blue painted on with a brush that skipped atop the canvas, give the impression of being at a party, a party that will last forever. Deep sea blue hills rise behind the field and below the sky. The child blue mountains tease the sky because they are closer to the golden yellow wheat and saintly Cypress trees. The blue of the mountains meshes with the blue of the sky, uniting them as one. It was during my initial viewing of the painting when vivid, poignant life and reality and color first became a part of reading Scripture; it was in this work that for the first time I saw the beauty of God working intertextually to provide evidence of His Nature as manifested through our culture. It was noticeable to the point of evoking my soul. The other text that worked hand-in-hand with Van Gogh’s painting so happened to be the twelfth verse of the fifty-fifth chapter written by Isaiah: “For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (English Standard Version). In this line, Isaiah paints a picture involving trees and mountains and rivers, using a pen instead of a brush to complete the image. Isaiah creates a picture for us, a beautiful vision of the extent to which this earth will celebrate when true joy is finally found– to the point where even the mountains and the hills will break out into singing and shouting, and the trees will clap their branches in an uproar. Reading through such verses before being introduced to Van Gogh would have merely elicited a lazy smile and a thought that it was rather weird and somewhat unrealistic to think of trees and mountains singing and clapping. God was not yet vivid and majestic and poetical. They were simply words, flat, boring letters that I read because that is what I thought Christians were supposed to do – read and pray and talk about God using churchy words, words in which nobody outside the sanctuary walls could begin to understand. Yet, Isaiah is trying to express such utter joy that straight-forward, easily understood prosaic language would fail to capture it. In revealing to his culture the magnitude of this celebration, his only option is poetical personification. Those residing in the confines of his culture may not have understood Yahweh, but in imagining a scene where mountains revert to singing and trees break out in applause, after reading such words, one would leave seeing how this abstract God is viewed in a much more tangible manner. Poetry takes a path that bypasses our superficial lobes of understanding and strikes a cord on a much deeper level. When reading poetry, one almost instinctively approaches the text with the understanding that syntax failed the writer in getting his/her point across. It acknowledges the limitations of our words. By using fewer syllables, poetry screams what is unspeakable. Influenced by Isaiah, John Dryden in his Eclogues puts forth his own take on the prophet’s verses in stating: “The Mountain tops unshorn, the Rocks rejoice: / The lowly Shrubs partake the Humane voice, / Assenting Nature, with a gracious nod, / Proclaims him, and salutes the new-admitted God” (III v. 97-100). Poetry and painting work together to create understanding of theoretical, ambiguous, and difficult to grasp concepts and ideas – like the image and nature of God. In viewing Van Gogh alongside my culture while he sat silently among his, I learned an invaluable lesson that the church had failed to instruct. It was outside the sanctuary walls where I most clearly saw God. The culture I discredited knew beauty and splendor because it understood that God is abstract, not clearly defined or systematically organized. Paintings and poetry that had been residing within the confines of culture for a much longer period of time than my meager existence illuminated the God I thought I readily grasped. After spending time with Van Gogh, I knew what Isaiah was talking about. After seeing Yellow Wheat and Cypresses, God was closer. He was closer because I finally allowed Him entrance into my soul. My ability to reason and the unquenchable desire to understand completely what I could not possibly box up gave way to a mystical nature that had been in hiding all along. I listened to Augustine when he said, “…you made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you,” and peace settled into my soul because my soul (Confessions 3). Like the Nature of God, the soul is rather difficult to explain. While viewing Van Gogh’s artwork and reading over the poetry of Isaiah, something inside of my being quiets, sits in a cushioned brown-leather chair, and contemplates this uneasy yet satisfying feeling that silently reverberates through my bones. I sit frustrated because I want to share with others this experience that transcends all other earthly experiences, yet my prosaic words fail me once again. Thomas Merton comes closest, for me, of explaining what this looks like, these feelings of completion because we were created to have our souls in tune, in rhythm with the Spirit of this world. It is in this state of contemplation, while viewing Van Gogh’s fields of wheat and trees, reading over the prophets lines, or sitting in an unlit room with candles as the only light, that I feel closest to God – closest because it isn’t my head working its way nearer to an understanding of the unexplainable, but rather my soul is reconnected to the very thing it was never meant to be separated from. Life changed for me on that warm, sunny August afternoon in Chicago. God became more abstract and poetical, more vivid and lifelike, less understandable yet I concurrently began to see Him a bit clearer. I began to see Him in all the places I told Him He couldn’t exist. I saw Him as Isaiah saw him – in the trees and mountains and rivers and lakes. I hear the applause and the singing and shouting continually arising from the birds in the trees, and I’ve come to understand that it isn’t always the birds doing the singing. This song that Nature sings is now audible. I could finally make out the beauty and grandeur that I knew existed in God, but didn’t know where to look or what lens to look through. I began to see Him in the strokes of His love that are evident in the vista of our everyday lives. God is in the trees and wheat, the mountains and rivers; He is poetical and personification is sometimes necessary to illustrate even the tinniest portion of His image. Every time we remove the blankets from our eyelids and saunter out into the world for another day, God is there. He guided the brushstrokes of artists who believed they acted alone. He gave stillness of hand and vision of fields to the laborers laboring in fields with solely a brush. He was seen in the bright dark eyes of each visitor while they beheld revelations from above. God’s on the canvas and in the lines of poetry. I am a little closer to seeing Him in a much bigger way than ever before. And it brings tears to my eyes. I believe this culture in which I reside will understand what I mean when they see the tears trickle down my cheeks. For in riding on the train, in hearing the various languages spoken, an understanding settled; an understanding that there are two sounds everyone recognizes – laughter and crying. Maybe God is behind both. |
