Between seeing and writing, the Sunflowers

The art teacher was already in her late fifties, at least the last twenty of them without the patience to be there. She used to wear clothes that were, at the same time, a bit ladylike (sets of loose pants and shirts, with light fabrics, sandals), but also with a certain presence, a je ne sais quoi, always with large colorful patterns. Her very short hair was reddish, in a burgundy tone and in a cut that I myself also would get ten years later. Her glasses were also red, cat-like or in any way a bit extravagant - but anything out of the ordinary looks extravagant at a Catholic school in a small town in the forgotten state of Paraná, southern Brazil. I still feel kind of silly, kind of inadequate in this gigantic world, but the truth is I spent more time there than anywhere else. I will never grow out of Pato Branco.

I liked art class, and on Wednesdays at 7 am I purposely chose the first desk in the middle row. On this day, she showed to the class one of those big heavy, thick art history books, and opened a page with a painting of a vase with yellow flowers. She showed it to the whole class, spoke briefly about Van Gogh, his genius and tragic story, and asked us to write something about that painting. Then, she took a book, sat in a chair and stayed there reading until the end of the class, indifferent.

It was an easy task, but like every art class, the class scattered, it became a mess, it turned into something else (which is how it is supposed to be). But I stayed there, in my hard school chair, looking at the painting and imagining things, deepened in the complexity of this act as simple as seeing and writing.

Between seeing and writing there are so many possibilities: to see, to imagine and to write; to see, to feel and to write; to see, to research and to write; to see, to see something else and to write; to see, to look and to write; to see, to write and to write… Everything there is between the eye and the hand is work: from the body, from the mind, from the stomach, from the skin, from the memory; there are so many possible paths between me and those sunflowers, my sight and my writing.

Everything there is between the eye and the hand is work: from the body, from the mind, from the stomach, from the skin, from the memory; there are so many possible paths between me and those sunflowers, my sight and my writing.

I didn’t think of all this at that time, but now I always do. Not so long ago I created the habit of taking a notebook with me to the exhibitions I go to — when I see something, when I truly see, when I see and feel, there is always something of the most urgent order that must be immediately translated into words.

That day, between my seeing and my writing, what laid in between were the information that the teacher gave us, the little I knew from Van Gogh, but also my imagination and the attention I put in those Sunflowers: in their brush strokes, colors and beauty.

I developed a little text, like 3 paragraphs. I created this whole theory that the sunflowers were actually a depiction of Van Gogh's mental enclosure, already taken by madness — all of the 7 sunflowers paintings, his little obsession, were made between 1888 and 1889, coinciding with the time of his ear amputation. From how I saw it, from the top of my 14 years of age, Van Gogh painted the vivacity of the flowers limited by the vase, faded to the enclosure and vanishment, like a metaphor for the moment of his own life, locked up in homes and psychiatric hospitals (his death took place shortly after and a few frames later).

The sunflowers contained in the vase contrast with his other paintings of open and spacious fields, both in content and form (thinking about the horizontality of the landscape and the verticality of the vase). It is true that there are also Van Gogh's landscapes that feel completely desolate, and perhaps the very radical openness of some themes makes the landscape even more threatening, as seen in Wheatfield with Crows, his last painting (which I can't help but wonder if it is a foreshadow of what would happen).

Wheatfield with Crows
Vincent Van Gogh, 1890
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Before the writing, one must be able to see: and so, this makes me also think about Walter Benjamin, which understood the connection between a XIX’s century dutch painter and a brazilian girl from a catholic school 120 years later. After all, one of the consequences of the possibility of endless image reproduction is precisely to broaden the possibilities of the gaze, to make images more accessible, to horizontalize the creation and reception of images - and so, make them travel for unimaginable years and paths.

I return to this art class, I return to this picture of the Sunflowers pinned to my memory wall, I go back in time and space because I saw the Sunflowers. And I had this very intimate experience, very mine, in a day filled with events so external and outside of me, so imposing and big — a lunar eclipse in my sign and the eve of the coronation of a king of a country that got enriched also at the cost of my own. None of it matters, all of it matters.

I avidly searched for the Sunflowers in the numerous corridors of the National Gallery, among countless rooms with more or less useless portraits of European aristocrats and bourgeoisie. I didn't care about any of it — not everything in art is able to move you, a good part of it is ego and ink waste. As for me, I was looking for the Sunflowers.

Sunflowers
Vincent Van Gogh, 1888
National Gallery, London

And so, with the Sunflowers right in front of me, not mediated by any book, reproduction, or teacher, between my seeing and my writing, a tear imposed itself. In front of them, so beautiful, so imposing, I was transported to the other side of the ocean, 15 years before, to the burgundy-haired teacher, to the first row of the class, to the naivety of a preteen's head and eyes.

I think I unconsciously look for this naivety in everything I do: I look for a childlike freshness of the uncovery of a new world, a way of perceiving things that is naive, simple and full of life. It's a beautiful thing to be taken aback by this feeling — and art, for me, sometimes allows it to happen. There is something in the artistic experience that is capable of dragging the body towards something else, be it the unknown or its complete opposite — that which we carry so close and so intimate with us that only something from the outside can tear it away.

My little school text sketched a melancholy relationship between the beautiful and flaring sunflowers stuck at their vase like the artist’s own destiny, that spent his last years of life through some mental health issues, without ever stopping to paint. In turn, the National Gallery’s technical text praised the Sunflowers’ symbolism of friendship and gratitude, both for its yellow color and for the fact that this painting was made by Van Gogh to adorn the room of his friend Gauguin for his visit to Arles.

The long-awaited arrival of a dear friend, his reception by sunflowers in beautiful brushstrokes of many yellows and green, kernels of plentiful seeds, promises of life and continuity; from this perspective, the Sunflowers would have represented joy, vivacity — not the vase-limiting one I was describing, but a genuine joy of an awaited reunion.

And so? What are the Sunflowers, what do they tell us? A portrait of an depressed artist on the verge of madness, metaphor of himself dammed by a vase? Or precisely the simple happiness of flowers waiting for a friend, the attempt to capture, keep, and share the ephemeral with those we love?

At the end, all there is is what presents itself to us, what we see, what the work makes us feel. What there is is ten or twelve sunflowers in a vase, or an infinite number of them in an open field, or their photograph in a big and heavy book, what there are are artists and flowers more or less alive, more or less dead, more or less yellow.

To me, the Sunflowers tell me all that and they also take me to my old school, to this moment in my teen years. The truth is the real intent of an artist is impossible to access — even if the artist say something, even they don’t say anything; at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what they say, at the same time that what and how they say matters the most. It doesn’t matter their life, their death, to hell their left ear and the fight with Gauguin. And at the same time… All of this matters, yes. Life, artist and work are eternally, completely intertwined. The yellow is friendship and it is also anguish, the flower lives in a dead vase, the vase lives in the painting, the sunflowers die but continue to live by Van Gogh, by Gauguin, by thousands of people seeing them everyday in person or by pictures.

At the end, all there is is what presents itself to us, what we see, what the work makes us feel. What there is is ten or twelve sunflowers in a vase, or an infinite number of them in an open field, or their photograph in a big and heavy book, what there are are artists and flowers more or less alive, more or less dead, more or less yellow. In the painting we see there is only the friendship and the pain that we feel, the memory it evokes, or else its complete indifference — because a painting can tell us nothing, as it meant nothing to my fellow colleagues in that art class. Art is not a universal experience, nor should it be.

My text from 15 years ago, much simpler than this one, must have been left unread by the teacher. I think she’s already dead, too. The friendship, the pain, the madness, are something else entirely by now — so is my seeing and my writing.