On the life of Vincent Van Gogh, extracted from Windows of the Soul, by Ken Gire

….Vincent lived among the miners, sharing their poverty.  He went down in the mines to be with them, breathing into his lungs the same black dust they breathed into theirs.  He visited the sick among them, bandaging their wounds, praying with them.  And he preached to them on Sundays, try the best he could to infuse a little light, a little hope, a little encouragement into their coal-dark lives.  “I should be very happy if someday I could draw them,” he wrote Theo [his brother], “so that those unknown or little-known types would be brought before the eyes of the people.”  Before long, that is what he did. (The poet) Rilke would later write of this as the beginning of van Gogh’s life as an artist.  “And so he becomes what is called an evangelist, and he goes to a mining district and tells the people the story of the gospel. 

Because of Vincent’s extreme self-denial, his fanatical zeal, and his unwillingness to follow the guidelines set before him, the governing body overseeing his ministry terminated his position.  Angered and embittered Vincent left, and, at twenty-seven years of age, embarked on what was to become his journey as an artist.

          “I want you to understand clearly my conception of art,” he wrote Theo at the beginning of his journey.  “I want to do drawings which touch some people…. In either figure or landscape I should wish to express, not sentimental melancholy, but serious sorrow….I want to progress so far that people will say of my work, he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.”

          Vincent was drawn to common laborers, the poor and the downtrodden, particularly.  He painted pictures of a peasant woman sewing, of women working in a peat field, of farmers eating around their table after a long day of toil.  He painted a young peasant with a sickle, a woman weeping, two women kneeling in prayer, a woman with a child in her lap, a girl looking at a baby in its cradle….

  I turned to the poet Rilke, who had spent much time studying Cesanne, Rodin, and van Gogh, among others.  He had spent hour after hour in museums, studying works of art….I turned to Vincent’s letters and met him there.  It was like talking with the artist himself.  I listened and from him learned how to look at his pictures.  In those letters, Vincent taught me the purpose of his paintings.  “In a picture, I want to say something comforting, as music is comforting.  I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize….”

          His sketch, At Eternity’s Gate, is of a man sitting in a chair, his face buried in his hands.  “In this print I have tried to express,” said van Gogh, “what seems to me one of the strongest proofs of existence…of God and eternity – certainly in the infinitely touching expression of such a little old man, which he himself is perhaps unconscious of, when he is sitting quietly in his corner by the fire.  At the same time there is something precious, something noble, which cannot be destined for worms.”

….Vincent’s mental state deteriorated.  So did the state of his spiritual life.  The erosion of faith is chronicled in the letters he wrote over the ten years that spanned his life as an artist.  The Scripture quotations, references to God, and reflections of his faith, gradually grew fewer and farther between.  At the same time, the anguish and despair grew greater and darker and more turbulent.   On May 8, 1889, the ailing artist was admitted to Saint-Remy asylum a few miles northeast of Arles, France.  He was given a bedroom there, sparsely furnished, and a small room off it.  In the meticulously researched movie about van Gogh’s life, Lust for Life, the nun who first showed him his room at the asylum asked, “Would you like me to open the windows?”  Vincent nodded.  When she opened them, he looked out on the countryside with it sun-washed fields, and it was the turning point in his life.  He converted the small room off his bedroom into a studio and started once again to paint….Later that year he finished the painting Starry Night….Of that painting, Vincent wrote:  “That raises again the eternal question:  Is the whole of life visible to us, or do we in fact know only the one hemisphere before we die?  For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream, in the same simple way as I dream about the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.”

In the end only Theo understood the passion burning within Vincent, a fire that burned and burned until it burned out.  The last spark is captured on canvas in a picture he painted in July 1890, titled simply, Cornfield with Crows.”  Vincent wrote Theo about the painting.  “A vast field of wheat under troubled skies” is the way he described it, “and I did not need to go out of my way to express sadness and extreme loneliness.”  [Recent biographers believe the fatal bullet was inflicted by a boy he knew with a ‘malfunctioning gun’, not suicidal].   The bullet lodged below his heart.  The wound was not immediately fatal, and he was taken to his room where he was attended by a physician and where his brother rushed to his side.  At 1:30 in the morning on July 29, 1890, while Theo was holding Vincent in his arms, the artist spoke his last words.  “La tristesse durea.”  “The sadness will never go away.”

          Through his pictures and his letters, through a movie and a song about him, I saw the artist and something of the artist’s soul.  But I saw something else.  I saw through him something of the great Artist of souls –Jesus.  “Christ” said van Gogh, “is more of an artist than the artists; He works in the living spirit and the living flesh; He makes men instead of statues.”