Two Rooms
Poems and Thoughts from the Anxious Poet
Two Rooms I’m sending you a little sketch ... this time it’s simply my bedroom. Only here everything depends on the colour. —Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo van Gogh from the Yellow House in Arles, October 1888 I have a small room with greenish-grey paper and two sea-green curtains with a design of very pale roses, brightened with touches of blood red. —Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo van Gogh from the Asylum in St Remy, May 1889 When I look at this room, I think of that one. I can so easily enter it again, the orange washstand in the early light, as I rush to scrub the night from my face, to charge out into the glowing dawn, and paint the red vineyard as the workers arrive. In this room, here in Saint Paul’s, my monastic asylum, nothing is my choice: not these curtains, legacy of the mad and ruined, or the broken-down, obliging armchair, nor are the bars and the bolted grey-green door. In that room in the yellow house at Arles I drifted on my dreams—the studio, the artists that would come. It was my inner shrine, a temple to the southern sun, with its powder-blue walls, an endless horizon to the brushstrokes of my ambitions. I lay now in a Verdigris metal bed, on a coral red, diamond-tiled floor, my dreams dried into delusions, cracking like thick impasto badly applied, and I am left with the ruined easels, and the clotted brushes of my life. Between these two rooms a pallid corridor in which I trudged alone, or so I thought, like the prisoners in Dore’s engraving I copied, shuffling hopelessly, a grey march of despair, unaware of those ahead or behind, desperate to escape into a better light. I have had to leave the room of dreams, though I revered its vibrancy, and now I am in the room of acceptance, tolerating those grim intruders: desolation and anxiety, inmates I have slowly befriended. In the uneasy peace of this room my curtain’s pink roses are the colour of scars, with an occasional splash of blood red, but still they frame a view to paint, a sun rising in all its glory, spring wheat and a garden to green my palate.
To listen to the poem click above
Wilma and I have just visited the Van Gogh - Poets and Lovers exhibition at the National Gallery in London. The last time we saw such a gathering of Vincent's work was in 1990, we had just married and we went on a Shearing’s coach tour to Amsterdam. Shearing’s coach tours were aimed at people in their 60’s, funny to think that we are those people now! Then we were in our 30’s and the only under 60s on the trip, for us it was the cheapest way to get there! We declined day trips to the Tulip fields and the Delpht China Museum so that we could queue at 6am for tickets to see the most comprehensive assemblage of Vincent’s work since his tragic death in 1890. I think the others on our coach thought we were off smoking weed and sampling the flesh pots of Amsterdam. This was confirmed when the coach was stopped on the way home at the Dutch Border and we were the only people on the whole coach to be searched by the police . The only contraband we had were a catalogue of the exhibition and loads of postcards of his paintings.
The paintings and the artist’s letters to his brother Theo have enthralled and haunted me in equal measure ever since and in 2014, when I had a crashing breakdown they came back to me as a source of solace. In my poetry collection from that time I dedicated a whole cycle of poems to Vincent. He proved to be a troubling and inspiring companion on my own Night Sea Journey. In 2018 when I published the book of the same name 1, Wilma and I made a pilgrimage to Provence in the South of France, staying in the little town of St Remy where Vincent spent a year recovering from his own major breakdown. We visited the asylum where he lived and painted just outside the town; still a working mental hospital housing a small museum dedicated to the artist’s sojourn there. We also visited Arles where he lived in his Yellow House and dreamed of setting up a colony of artists in the South of France. His only companion in this failed venture was Gaugin, who only stayed a little while and whose departure seems to have sparked the crisis in Vincent’s mental state. That and a surfeit of Absinthe - consumed in large quantities in the local bars. I was still pretty fragile myself in those days and felt a deep affinity with Vincent, especially the way he seemed to paint his way out of a dark corner.
One of the things that really struck us, as we wandered the rooms of the National Gallery dedicated to this major exhibition celebrating the bicentenary of the institution, was how prolific this period in Arles and San Remy was. All the work is from 1888 - 1889. The paintings chart all the places we visited in 2018, especially his two bedrooms. The first in Arles where he painted the Sunflowers and the Arlesienne (a woman from Arles) that were (and are displayed as such) meant to be viewed as a triptych; his homage to the South in honour of Gaugin. His painting of his bedroom is near these iconic paintings is again full of colour, a room of hope and ardour. Then in another part of the exhibition are all his paintings and sketches post breakdown. My absolute favourite is of the garden in the asylum. It had been a monastery before it was a sanatorium and has a cloister and a peaceful chapel. Vincent’s depiction of this inner sanctum of verdancy and hard won peace with an empty bench in the mid-ground is a worthy evocation of those qualities. I used to have this pasted to my Breviary (priestly prayer book) when I was training for the priesthood. I looked at it many times a day and it was a constant invitation to solitude and sanctuary.
The sheer volume of paintings and sketches from that period is astounding. Especially given that he hardly sold a piece whilst he was alive. His letters to his brother are as much of work of art as his paintings.. Theo was his friend, confidant, patron and benefactor. He died a year after Vincent in 1891 at the age of thirty three, Vincent died aged thirty seven and they are buried together in Auvers-Sur-Oise. It is so rare to be privy to the inner and daily thoughts of an artist as you view their work. On the walls of the gallery in London are many of these quotes from his letters.
Through his painting, his constant communication with Theo, the care he received from the Asylum, and his deep acceptance of his state and the failure of his dreams he found a way to face his descent, his own night sea journey. The fruit of this was all around us on the walls of this wonderful exhibition. My poem The Two Rooms is a homage in words to what Vincent captures on canvass. That there is a deep and dark creative corridor that passes from one state to another. This liminality, if approached with respect and trepidation leads us to a new state of being that is closer to our deep self or soul. We may seem more damaged but also more transparent and able to let the infinite shine through our lives and our work.
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A wonderful poem and tribute.