Van Gogh's Work Ethic

Some of my journal shots from March 2002:



There were a few years of my life, when I first moved to San Francisco when I was 24, and continuing until I started grad school, where I took my journal with me everywhere. I took it to work, I took it on the bus, I took it to bars and parties. I remember sunny spring weekend days in the outer Richmond when suddenly the world would burst into color after weeks of foggy monochrome when I would sit out on the sidewalk in front of the cafe down the street from my apartment drinking chai and sharing a burrito and carrot cake with Jared, writing in my journal with blissed gusto. The point was usually to open the world up just a bit more, and the best days had writing that surprised me and gave me new insights, like the best days of fiction writing do. Sometimes the writing was just about putting myself back together, a kind of psychic cataloging, more reorganizing myself than opening the world. Drawing was important, too, all play, but I thought of it as my work. I thought of it all as my work, filling journals with thoughts and drawings. There wasn't effort in it, I wanted it like I wanted dinner parties with my roommates and walks on the beach.

For the most part I stopped writing in my journal when I was at CCA, and I think that's a good thing. Writing fiction used a new kind of discipline, and didn't have the effortlessness or craving for me that journal writing did. The satisfaction that I got from writing fiction was more intense than journal writing, though, and it was a new challenge. Drawing changed, too. It was different sitting down with an objective for a drawing and a bunch of new skills and media to incorporate, rather than just the quick intuitive pen and ink sketches I usually did in my journals. Most days my drawing classes would feel like a struggle, and each new drawing would have a fresh new pain and resistance when I would sit down with my giant white sheet of paper. But then some days, something would click into place, everything would start working, and time would stop while I drew. It had the same feeling of effortless creation as the great journal writing days.

This was one of the first drawings I did in grad school that had a clicking-in feeling for me (after about a month of struggle):


I think that feeling of effortlessness is the result of having integrated skills that you can then draw upon without thinking about them, they're just right there. I get the strongest sense of that effortlessness when I look at the drawings of Richard Diebenkorn. They are not at all precious, and in fact feel kind of dashed off, but with a deep well of technique and experience that he's mastered and incorporated.

Richard Diebenkorn
Untitled, RD 170
not dated

I'm so uncomfortable with times of new learning; before the skills are in place, the times of practicing when everything comes out slowly and painfully (and bad, ugly, and wrong.) Writing this, though, I'm remembering that slow, painful time is totally necessary, and that the times of getting to new levels of mastery where everything comes out effortless and it's working, those times are times of grace, but if you're growing as an artist are times that will pass, and you'll head back into the painful discovery period again. Maybe the key is not to think of the discovery period as painful, but instead learn to enjoy them as exciting periods of inquisition. It's kind of embarrassing to write that, actually, because: practice, duh. But I think it's something that I need to remind myself over and over.

I started this in response to a passage I read in Rilke's Letters on Cezanne, which I'll put down here. (So funny that Rilke thought he was writing this letter to his wife, but actually he was writing it to me):

...one is still so far away from being able to work at all times. Van Gogh could perhaps lose his composure, but behind it was always his work, he could no longer lose that. And Rodin, when he's not feeling well, is very close to his work, writes beautiful things on countless pieces of paper, reads Plato and follows him in his thought. But I have a feeling that this is not the result of discipline or compulsion (otherwise it would be tiring, the way I've been tired from working in recent weeks); it is all joy; it is natural well-being in the one thing that surpasses everything else. Perhaps one has to have a clearer insight into the nature of one's "task," get a more tangible hold on it, recognize it in a hundred details. I believe I do feel what van Gogh must have felt at a certain juncture, and it is a strong and great feeling: that everything is yet to be done: everything. But this devotion to what is nearest, this is something I can't do as yet, or only in my best moments, while it is at one's worst moments that one really needs it. Van Gogh could paint an Interieur d'hopital, and in his most anxious days he painted the most disquieting objects. How else could he have survived. This is what needs to be attained, and I have a feeling it can't be forced. It must come out of insight, from pleasure, from no longer being able to postpone the work in view of all the many things that have to be done. Ah, if only one did not have the comforting memories of times spent without working.

Letters On Cezanne
October 4, 1907 (Friday)

The image in my journal next to the map of Amsterdam, with the vermilion border and the made-up kanji, is a postcard of one of van Gogh's paintings that he did based after Japanese woodcuts: Flowering plum tree (after Hiroshige) summer 1887. I like it because it is not like anything of his I've seen, because it's cool to see some of his roots, and because it's kind of awkward-- he was trying something but he hadn't nailed it quite yet. We associate him with the periods of genius grace, but then there's this, too:

Vincent van Gogh
Flowering plum tree (after Hiroshige)
summer 1887

then, something clicks, and this:

Vincent van Gogh
Almond Blossom
1890