Vincent & The Tree With the Lights In It

Lightning strikes. Sky and land meet. The cloud of one thought meets the ground of another, neurons fire and connections are made. With a flash of insight, the landscape lights up.

I had been reading the letters of Vincent Van Gogh; leaning in, listening as he explained to Theo that he was trying to, desperately needing to, take what he saw and how it made him feel and capture it in his paintings. I could feel him pacing as he wrote; the way, surely, he must have hit his fist on the table between lines. He saw something that others did not; if only he could help them see it…

I tried to find the particular letter, the very words he used, but try as I might I cannot find it. Either I’m reading between the lines — the lines of his letters or the repeated strokes in his paintings — or maybe I see in his paintings what we don’t see when we look at the land out our window. The aliveness of it all. He makes the land move, objects move, air move. He shows us that the world is alive and fizzing, and that the inanimate is anything but.

“From the sky in my mind, Van Gogh struck out like lightning and hit upon something else I had read — the tree with the lights in it.”

In her essay ‘Seeing’ Annie Dillard talks about a girl who had surgery which gave her sight. She saw a tree out the window and described it as “the tree with the lights in it”. She was describing the visual effect of a tree with gaps between its leaves and branches; a tree that was letting the light through.

The girl didn’t see what we see. Hers was a baby’s sight, all light and dark. It was patches of colour without definition; a sight of no depth. It was seeing without labels. Annie Dillard walked around for weeks trying to cast off the knowledge of what she was looking at, desperate to re-see. She wanted to see not what our brain filters and names as a tree, but a tree with lights in it.

Road with Cypress and Star, Vincent Van Gogh (1890)
In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh excitedly declared this painting one of his very best.

This original kind of seeing — seeing before we make sense of what we see — is elusive and rare as adults. We might experience it in a new land, seeing plants and animals that we have no labels for yet. I felt it as I stood on the beachside cliff in California, staring at the strange birds flying past. It is wonderful to see like this. It is surprising. The older we get, the harder it is to be surprised in this way. But when we are, the unknown unnamed stands out, sharp in relief and fine in detail. It is like a cut-out scene in a pop up book, curious and enchanting.

We’ve all had moments where the world looks altered. Something shifts and we don’t know what we are looking at. The fine arms of knowing that criss-cross our brain let go and put their hands in their pockets. We are in awe, and then it is over. We find ourselves back in our body, our brain holding hands with its old self again. The lightning strike is swallowed by the ground, or retracted by the thundercloud, and we’re in the dark again. All we have is the memory, playing like a movie on our closed eyelids.

Van Gogh painted from life. Like many of his contemporaries he painted en plein air, or outside. Before this time, landscapes were painted in artist’s studio. They were idealised landscapes, taken from the imagination. Van Gogh was adamant that he must (indeed, that all artists should) paint from life. What did he see out there that allowed him to paint what he did?

“Where we see a tree, did he see the tree with the lights in it? Can we look at his paintings and consider that what he painted was realistic? Is it possible that with all our living and labelling and not-really-looking, we have lost our capacity to see? Did he just never lose it?”

It’s hard to explain how a man who was rejected and ridiculed in his lifetime is now revered. We can’t really explain why so many are so drawn to his paintings. He seems to show us something we know is true, even if we cannot name it.

Looking at his paintings is like standing out in a thunderstorm in the dark. If you wait long enough, lightning will strike, the form of things will appear in the darkness and, in the blink of an eye, disappear again. His paintings are like that moment - they are the sudden blazing flash before shoes become shoes again, sunflowers hang in their vase, stars cease their spinning and the tree with the lights in it becomes a tree, once again.

Mary xx