VISIO DIVINA | WHEAT FIELD WITH CYPRESSES
Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheat Field With Cypresses, July 1889
Years ago, my wife and I visited New York to see one of our generous longtime ministry partners. A part of our habitual side attractions was the draw to the art museum scene in NYC. During our visit to The MET (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), I must have liked the painting enough to capture it in my phone. It was not until this month (July) that a fuller meaning has risen in me. Sometimes you are drawn to things you don’t initially know why or how until later; you reap the benefit from the past curious impulse, however small they may have been. Timing (and our response to timing) seems to be a big part of living and living well.
As Van Gogh voluntarily checked into a mental asylum at Saint-Rémy, over time he was given access to go outside the asylum for short walks and/or to paint. He painted this remarkable painting in July 1889. Contradictorily, Van Gogh was more stable and steadier during his time at Saint-Rémy, which produced Van Gogh’s best creative and most authentic Van Gogh-ish works. Van Gogh was a prolific painter during his time at the asylum, producing some 150 paintings during the span of a year. Only a year later (July 1890), he would die.
This painting was one of Van Gogh’s favorite summertime paintings, which resulted in a series. Cypress trees were one of Van Gogh’s landscape favorites with perhaps the most notable cypress in The Starry Night, which dwarfs the town right next to the tree ascending into the heavens. He wrote a letter to his brother, Theo, capturing his sentiment regarding the cypresses.
“The cypresses are always on my mind, I would like to do something with them like the sunflower paintings, because I am surprised that they have not yet been done as I see them. They are beautiful, in lines and proportions, like Egyptian obelisks. And the green is of such a distinguished quality.”
Back to Wheat Field with Cypresses. The sky takes up more than half of the entire painting. The sky featuring cumulus clouds as its main performer is expressive, full of movements, seemingly in intimate communication with the earth below. Where my eyes go next are the towering cypresses, reaching into the sky. I imagine Van Gogh imagined the cypresses as the bridge between the heavens and the earth. The next prominent portion of the painting is the wheat field, swaying and dancing in the gentle breeze (one could almost hear the wind caressing the wheat field) and contrasting in color from the sky and the cypresses. Then I notice the demure, easily overlooked, and almost forgotten wildflowers on the bottom of the painting. Lastly, I notice what looks like a small portion of the rock in the bottom middle of the painting.
I imagine Van Gogh standing on a contiguous rock surface painting, looking up almost vertically into the mountain, the cypresses, and the sky. I imagine him standing because he was so captivated by the sight that he would not take time to sit lest he loses his perspective. Besides, he probably would have been tired of sitting down from the asylum. “Standing on a rock” triggers several biblical exhortations, one of which is the image of the rock representing Jesus. I am standing on Jesus, looking up to the world, asking what I can do to serve the world. Because Van Gogh was looking up into the astounding scenery, he was able to capture both the grandeur of the sky and the magnificence of cypresses and the dainty wildflowers without losing sight of any. I sense an invitation arising: that I look up, put myself in a humble position (identifying and in solidarity with Jesus), and see the big and expansive picture but not miss the delicate details as life happens. Look up, see the big, and notice the small.
As with others, I would like to get to the top to see the breathtaking panoramic view when I hike the mountains. The truth is when I get to the top, the view is indeed breathtaking, but I lose sight of the dainty wildflowers because I am looking down. This imagery is how I have and still occasionally like to operate in real life, being at the top, looking down. Thus, putting myself in a position of looking up requires some intentional work.
Noticing the beauties and gifts of small things in life is not something that comes to me naturally. This is something I have been working hard at. Learning to notice small things in life and to hear small inner voices must share the same origin of an intimate and gentle Father. I have not arrived, but slowing down and pausing decisively helps, even as Van Gogh also “paused” to draw the painting, taking every little thing in as life happens.
There is an inner prompt that urges me to invite others to see the world as Van Gogh saw it. How we see can change the world we live in. How we see must precede how we engage and how we act. If we learn to look up, our action will be to serve the world. If we tend to look down, our action will be to dominate and control the world.