FIRST STEPS | PART 1
My wife and I have facilitated multiple group spiritual direction sessions centering around the exercise called visio divina. As lectio divina is “divine or sacred reading” based on various Scripture texts or other sacred writings, visio divina is about “divine or sacred seeing” utilizing pictures, paintings, and/or images. A couple of advantages of visio divina are to helpfully suppress our rational and logical thinking mind and to engage our right hemisphere of the brain as well as our subjective-personal-experiential life lens when interacting with the image. You feel what you feel. You see what you see. No two people see the same painting or image and have the same impact. We interpret and give meaning based on how and where we are in life. There are no right objective answers. You are rightfully entitled to see what you see and feel.
One painting we have done visio divina on multiple occasions is Van Gogh’s First Steps, after Millet (1890). As Van Gogh greatly admired Jean-Francois Millet, Van Gogh painted his “translated” interpretation of Millet’s original work using his imaginative infusion of colors. I first saw this painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the summer of 2016. It grabbed me enough to take a picture, not knowing why I was drawn to it at the time.
Artists often function as prophets of our day, seeing the reality, critiquing, creating an alternative lens to see, and wooing and inviting us to embrace the alternative reality. The general public often has been latecomers to these both subtle and vivid invitations of the artists of the past. It seems that we are always in a catch-up mode, seeing things more clearly only retrospectively. We are subjected to see what we are trained or conditioned to see until things are radically disrupted. How the history of arts evolved over time and especially during significant epochs of human development reveals the development of human consciousness in broad strokes. I’ve been fascinated by the drastic departure from the late Medieval paintings depicting lucid religious themes to the early Renaissance period where they began painting landscapes, objects, and later, normal everyday people.
When I visited the Impressionists section of Paris’ Musée d'Orsay a few years back, what caught my eyes was the explanation, “The artists preferred a style of painting that captured the moment, that conveyed a personal and subjective impression of a changing world. The brushwork is rapid and visible; the framing is often off-centre; the colours are light, seeking to capture the atmospheric effects outdoors in contrast to the precise, highly polished paintings produced in the studio.” If you are a fan of Impressionism, you would appreciate the words above. “Capturing the moment” using a “personal and subjective impression” is what makes Impressionist Art a significant departure from the earlier expressions. The personal and subjective impression essentially was an act of courage to be oneself in the sea of truth as objectivity.
After reading Van Gogh’s biography and some of his letters to his younger brother Theo, I became a fan of Vincent Van Gogh. I have come to appreciate his prophetic candor and reckless pursuit of the vision of his true self, which often came with great struggle, as well as the constant critiquing of what was not yet in the world. It is interesting to me that Van Gogh after moving to Paris initially dabbled into Impressionism by mimicking what has become the normal and accepted expression of Impressionistic Art but quickly discovered that was not his path to walk. Van Gogh would not be Van Gogh if he had not pursued his own path. The brotherly love between Vincent and Theo, which spans over decades until Vincent died (and they are laid side by side in a little cemetery, north of Paris) is palpable, heartwarming, and well-documented. It speaks to the friend, brother, and community we all need when pursuing the “God-given” call in our lives.