“The world concerns me only in so far as I owe it a certain debt and duty, so to speak, because I have walked this earth for 30 years, and out of gratitude would like to leave some memento in the form of drawings and paintings—not made to please this school or that, but to express a genuine human feeling.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
I was wandering through the studio the other day looking at the paintings that are here. There are pieces that represent just about every year from the past 29 or 30 years. It’s been such a long time that even if it’s one or two pieces a year that end up back with me, it adds up.
But it wasn’t the number of pieces that struck me this time. It was more a question of what will become of them one day. Will they still exist long after I am gone? Will they find homes where they will spark some emotional response with their new owners or will they never be seen again as they rot in some mountainous landfill somewhere?
It was a sort of memento mori, a reminder of my death which made me somewhat sad. But it also made me hopeful that the work will somehow live beyond me and serve one day as a memento vivere, a reminder of my life.
In the end, I realized that if even a few make it to the future, that would be alright with me. They would serve as expressions of my gratitude for my time here and hopefully help some future person recognize their life’s own uniqueness and express their own gratitude for it.
This reminded me of a post from back in 2018 that dealt with this using a passage from a Vincent van Gogh letter to his brother. I thought it was worth sharing again, if only to look at van Gogh’s wonderful works.
[From 2018]
Thought a good way to kick off this week might be to share a few paintings from Vincent van Gogh along with a quote from one of his letters that speaks very much to my own feelings about my own reasons for doing what I do. These are not his better known paintings, though some of you may well know these pieces. They’re pieces that speak to my own personal inclinations. You might notice that most of these paintings have his ball sun/moon.
The idea of feeling a need to leave a memento behind that expresses one’s gratitude and one’s expression of self is one that is not foreign to me. I often think about how my work will speak for me after I am gone. Actually, if it will speak into the future at all and if so, will it be an honest reflection, a true representation of my voice.
I know that an artist, for all of the ways they try to guide the narrative about their work and life, has little control over their work in the future.
What will be, will be.
Their voice might echo but it is always just that, an echo, a one-sided conversation from the past. Hopefully, what is said in that echo reverberates and speaks to someone of that future time so that they can fully understand and connect to the feeling behind it. And if so, with the hope that they might respond to that voice in some way that continues to give life to it.
As I said, an artist has little control over this outside of doing their work with honest efforts and emotions. It’s obvious this was the case in the work of van Gogh and we continue to have a conversation with his echoes from the past, his mementos of gratitude.
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