Van Gogh’s collages of consolation

Tuesday, October 8, 2019

The wonderful online print collection of the Van Gogh Museum

Knowing next to nothing about Van Gogh before reading his biography, I am struck by what a great reader and collector of images he was, how pictures and words were married together for him. (He would’ve been a great cartoonist, I think.)

This passage From Naifeh & Smith’s Van Gogh: The Life describes the process of collecting and collage at work, how images and words are combined and transformed in the artist’s mind:

The consoling images that Vincent took from literature and art underwent a similar transformation as he reimagined them—simplified and intensified them—in pursuit of his heart’s elusive comfort. He changed the names of poems and paintings. He disregarded dissonant characters and authorial views. Like the illustrated books of his childhood, he grafted words to images and images to words, insistently reshaping both to his narrative of reassurance. He paired pictures with poetry, sometimes transcribing lines from literature and scripture directly onto his prints to create collages of consolation. This process of layering words and images so gratified his manic imagination and his search for comfort that it would become his principal way of seeing and coping with the world.

Collage is something he learned as a child:

Under their mother’s tutelage, all the Van Gogh children mastered the parlor arts of collage, sketching, and painting, in order to decorate and personalize the gifts and notes they relentlessly exchanged. A simple box might come adorned with a bouquet of painted flowers; a transcribed poem, with a cutout wreath. They illustrated favorite stories, marrying words to images in the manner of the emblem books widely used to teach children moral lessons.

Related: glue one thing to another

A good time to be a pack rat

Monday, January 14, 2019

Marie Kondo mania is in full swing again thanks to her Netflix special. I haven’t watched the show yet, but I read her book at the beginning of 2016, and wrote two posts in 2017 on the connections between messiness and creativity — “Tidying Up” and “The art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking for.” They eventually became chapter 8 (“When in doubt, tidy up”) of Keep Going, which begins:

(If you want the rest, you’ll have to pre-order the book.)

Thinking back to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, what disturbed me most — as a writer and an artist — was the idea that how you feel NOW in this very moment is the most important factor in whether you should keep or discard something.

Books are the obvious example (already covered here), so let’s take photographs: Kondo says to keep a certain amount of photos from an event, and toss the rest. And yet, I recently looked through a box of loose photos from my wedding, and I found all kinds of interesting photos that didn’t interest me when I was putting together our wedding album.

You’ve probably experienced something similar: A photo you didn’t think was interesting at the time, later on you find it more interesting than the stuff you chose to frame. My friend Clayton Cubitt once tweeted something along the same lines:

I realize that nowhere does Kondo explicitly say this, but there is a kind of anti-collecting streak in the book. Most artists are collectors, if not hoarders, and we don’t just collect the things that “spark joy”: we collect things (objects yes, but also hunches and ideas) that we’re unsure or ambivalent about. Things we get the feeling we could use later.

It tickled me recently to read this piece, “Edward Gorey, Pack Rat”:

When he wasn’t writing, drawing, illustrating, and designing—and even when he was—Edward Gorey was collecting. Over the course of his life, the artist gathered, and kept, everything from tarot cards to trilobites to particularly interesting cheese graters. “We ask the docents not to use the word ‘hoarder,’” says Hischak, grinning as he surveys the House’s newest exhibit, which focuses on Gorey’s pack rat tendencies. “But he really did hoard interesting things.”

I suspect that, like Gorey, every creative person has just a tiny bit of a pack rat in them. (I like that Gorey referred to his collecting as “accumulating.”)

It may be a bad time to be a pack rat, but it’s also a good time: CNN reports that Goodwill donations are way up. So “Get in, Losers, We’re Going Thrifting.”

Storing up images

Monday, April 16, 2018

I love reading more than one book at a time and letting the books talk to each other. I love promiscuous reading. Here’s Octavia Butler on her practice:

I generally have four or five books open around the house—I live alone; I can do this—and they are not books on the same subject. They don’t relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect. I also listen to audio-books, and I’ll go out for my morning walk with tapes from two very different audio-books, and let those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another.

I’m currently dipping in and out of two books: 1) Harold Gatty’s Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass — a 1958 wayfinding manual and Christmas gift from my wife — and 2) Tom Hart’s How To Say Everything, material Tom’s been working on for the past decade, but just recently published in book form.

They compliment each other beautifully on the subject of storing up images. Here’s Gatty:

There is something which all the greatest artists and writers, naturalists and scientists, voyagers and explorers, poets and pioneers, share. It is an interest in the external world and the ability to contribute something creative to human life in this world by means of taking parts of the world to pieces and putting them all together again. The ability to observe, and the ability to see the little things that seem trivial at first, may become amazingly important and meaningful. Out of little observations huge ideas may grow; and if a mind, made receptive by training in the use of the senses, can store away a mass of observations, the time will come when the whole collection can be unrolled, connected together as a great novel is planned, in a compelling pattern that tells us something new.

And here’s Hart, quoting Stanislavski, in his chapter, “Creating A Store”:

You must be constantly adding to your store. For this purpose you draw… principally upon your own impressions, feelings and experiences. You also acquire material from life around you, real and imaginary, from reminiscences, books, art, science, knowledge of all kinds, from journeys, museums and above all from communication with other human beings.

In both of these contexts the word “store” refers to stocking up or keeping a supply for future use, like a squirrel, but it also conjures retail associations in my brain. I’m reminded of Allen Ginsberg, in “A Supermarket in California,” who, dreaming of Walt Whitman, wandering around, looking at the moon, stops into the neon supermarket, “shopping for images.”

That seems to be so much of what I’m always doing — shopping for images — adding to the store, stocking up for the future…

Top image: Drawing of a brain by Jules (3)