(Revisiting Paris… )
It’s only brushstrokes of color, heavy and textured, deliberate and intended, somehow brash and unrefined, and yet I hold my breath, hold this moment of witnessing. For it is that, the witnessing of something noble.
It’s a painting. Just of sheets, a window, hooks, a chair or two. Nothing ornate, gilded, plush. Just a homely bedroom of a doleful, sometimes tortured, man, a man skimping by on money sent from his brother to buy food, to rent this humble place for a pillow. Hardly worth esteeming to canvas or the ages.
And yet…
“I had a new idea in my head… this time it’s just simply my bedroom, only here color is to do everything and giving, by its simplification, a grander style to things….”
I stand inches from the frame, want to reach out and let fingertips touch this color doing everything, this simple thing doing a grand thing.
Daubs and strokes they are, swaths of oil shades, broad rich lines. Thick, layered color slashes across canvas stretched, like the underscoring of words. Like a statement.
My understanding of his language, his sentiment, is not cerebral but in the parts of me collecting, surging, with emotion, that tender place that speaks in colors, in movement. In that which the heart knows as inexpressible.
I lean into the textured white that fills the pillow. This is the work of the anguishing unafraid. A dauntless one who endlessly jousted his own apparitions.
“I went… still accompanied to the village, the mere sight of people and things had an effect on me that I thought I was going to faint and I felt very ill…”
“The emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without being aware of working…”
It’s only colors, a painting of a bedroom, I know. But for me, rooted here before 22 by 29 inches of soul pigment, it’s this raw clarion to do what we must do, simply because we must.
Regardless of the naysayers, the loneliness, the giants we think lurk in this land, because He calls, and that is what matters.
I want to be bound to Christ with unbreakable bonds and to feel these bonds… To live in and for Christ, to be one of the poor of His kingdom, steeped in leaven filled with His spirit, impelled by His love… To become one who finds repose in Him alone, who desires nothing but Him on earth. Lingering with Scripture: Deuteronomy 31:6 Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.” Lifting voice in response to Scripture: Father, if I desire nothing but You, what is there to really fear? You go with us, calling us to come to sing the song You meant for us, on the canvas You’ve given. Living Scripture: Where is God calling me to take courage today? Photos: Taken at the Orsay Museum in Paris of Vincent van Gogh’s The Artist’s Room in Arles
Changed by old paint, I wander out of the gallery.
Van Gogh’s Prayer, written to his brother: 
