Van Gogh, the Thickness of Paint

One

Wheatfield with Crows.

Painted in July 1890, at Auvers-sur-Oise.
Not long before he died.

A small surface.
Different in size from what we saw in the last two chapters.
It is all visible without spreading the arms.

Only it is long sideways.
More than twice its height.

So the eye moves left and right.
Up and down there is nowhere to go.

This proportion is already a sentence.
It makes one see what is spread wide and keeps one from looking up.

A wheatfield.
Ripe wheat fills the lower half of the surface.

A road goes in between the fields and breaks off.
There is no telling where it goes.

The sky is dark.
Blue, and heavy.

Black points are scattered.
Birds. Crows.

Flying or falling, it is not clear.

Now look from the side.

The surface is not flat.
The paint has risen like ridges.

Wherever the brush passed a ridge was made.
On those ridges the light of this present room catches.

Small shadows appear.

The shadows are not painted.
The surface made them.

Move the head left and right and the picture changes a little.
Because the planes taking the light change.

This painting is not still.

Look at the yellow of the wheat.
It is not one layer.

There is another color beneath and the yellow went on above it.
The color beneath shows through the gaps.

The color was not made by mixing paint but by stacking paint.

Two

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853 in the Netherlands.

He was a pastor's son.
He did several kinds of work and failed in several places.

He began painting around twenty-seven.
He died at thirty-seven.

He lived as a painter for ten years.

These ten years can be divided in two.

The first half was spent in the north.
The Netherlands and Belgium.

Overcast sky, low light, wet ground.

The surfaces of that period are dark.
There is much brown and black and earth color.

The picture of the people eating potatoes is from that period.
One lamp barely lights a dark room.

That the color was dark was not taste.
The light he saw was so.

The miners and farmers of the north work in dark places.
Paint that darkness bright and it becomes a lie.

The second half was spent in the south.

He passed through Paris and went to the south of France.
To Arles.

It was 1888.

The light was different.
It was light he had never seen in the north.

The color rose.
Yellow and blue filled the surface.

This much is the well-known story.
From the darkness of the north to the brightness of the south.

But this chapter means to see something else.

It was not only the color that changed.
The thickness of the paint changed.

In the south his paint grew thick.

Why.

Because when the light is too strong, color alone cannot hold it.

Color is what is laid on a surface.
When the light is strong the color flies off.

What is needed then is not stronger color but surface.

Thick paint makes its own relief.
Relief takes real light.

Paint it and it becomes a picture of light; stack it and it becomes a thing that takes light.

He chose the second.

Arles has a wind.
It is called the mistral.

A dry, strong wind that comes down from the north.
It continues for days.

He painted outdoors.
The wind knocked the easel over.

The story remains in his letters.
He wrote that he drove pegs into the ground to hold the easel.

A painting made in wind carries the trace of wind.

The brushwork grows hurried.
There is no time to hesitate.

One draws in a single pass and moves on.

So his line is short and repeated.
He draws many times in the same direction.

This is not character but condition.

One cannot keep a brush on the surface long in the wind.

He used a great deal of paint.
Money was short.

He wrote to his brother many times asking for paint to be sent.

Painting thickly is an expensive matter.
He paid that price and painted thickly.

And thick paint does not dry well.

While waiting for it to dry the surfaces cannot be stacked.
Transport is difficult too.

Matter changes the conditions of a life.

Three

Here is the argument of this chapter.

Van Gogh has been read as a painter of color.
The yellow of Arles comes with his name.

But color is half.

The other half is thickness.

This is why this book placed him in the part on materiality rather than the part on color.

Kiefer carried the ground onto the surface.
Goldsworthy set the surface on the ground.

Van Gogh moved nothing.
He painted with paint alone.

And he made that paint into matter.

He did not attach soil; he used paint like soil.
He did not attach leaves; he stood paint up like leaves.

He did another thing with the same material.

What changes when this is done.
Four things change.

First, the painting takes light twice.

Once it is painted light.
The sun and the lamp painted inside the surface.

Once again it is real light.
The lighting of this present room catches on the relief.

Two lights are laid over each other.

Second, time remains on the surface.

A thick stroke cannot be erased.
Thin paint disappears under overpainting, but thick paint leaves a trace.

So what was drawn once is visible to the end.

A surface without hesitation is a surface that could not hesitate.

Third, the painting becomes a thing.

A flat surface is close to a window.
One looks beyond it.

An uneven surface is close to a wall.
One stops at the surface.

Stopping, the painting looks like an object.

Fourth, fūdo appears as surface.

The strong light and strong wind of the south.
Those two demanded thickness.

The light demanded surface and the wind demanded speed.

Thick paint and fast brushwork.
His form came out of this.

This is not the result of temperament.
It is the result of condition.

Read him only as a painter of hot temperament and this place is not seen.

Temperament is the same anywhere.
Form differs from land to land.

In the north he painted dark and thin.
In the south he painted bright and thick.

He was the same man.
The land was different.

Four

Stand before Byun Shi-Ji's surface.

Both men painted in wind.

Van Gogh pegged his easel down in the mistral.
Byun Shi-Ji painted in the wind of Jeju.

And the response differs.

Van Gogh met the wind head on.
He fixed the easel and painted.
The wind was interference.

Byun Shi-Ji let the wind in.
He called it into the surface.
The wind was the subject.

One painted while enduring the wind, and the other painted the wind.

The thickness is opposite too.

Van Gogh stacked.
He put paint on and made a surface.

Byun Shi-Ji dried.
He kept the color thin and left a dry feeling.

The color of dried grass cannot be thick.
What is dry is thin.

Put paint on thickly and it looks moist.
Keep it thin and it looks dry.

So thinness is not a lack but a choice.

One stacked matter and took light.
The other reduced matter and got dryness.

Both ways are materiality.
Stacking is not the only materiality.

Look at the crows.

The crows of Wheatfield with Crows are in a dark sky.
They are scattered as black points.

There are crows on Byun Shi-Ji's surface as well.
They pass low.

Both are black points.
Both have no sound.

But the position differs.

Van Gogh's crows come from above.
They come from the side of the sky toward the person.

Byun Shi-Ji's crows are low.
They pass near a person's eye level.

Something needs care here.

On Byun Shi-Ji's surface the small black shapes near the horizon are not birds.
They are small boats.

What is far off is a boat, and what passes low and near is a crow.

Miss this distinction and the painting changes.
The boat is leaving and returning; the crow is what is beside one.

The lengths of time differ too.

Van Gogh painted for ten years.
The time in the south was a little over two.

Within two years the form was complete.

Byun Shi-Ji painted for sixty-eight years.
From the study of 1945 to the last painting of 2013.

On Jeju alone, thirty-eight.

One burned briefly and the other endured long.

There is no ranking here.
The speed differed.

There is fūdo that begets quickly and fūdo that begets slowly.

The sun of southern France arrives at once.
One knows it the moment it strikes.

The wind of Jeju does not arrive at once.
One has to take it for years to know.

Sun comes as intensity and wind comes as repetition.

So one brought out a form in two years and the other in decades.

One thing remains at the end.

Van Gogh was a stranger in the south of France.
He was not born there and did not become a person of that place.

Byun Shi-Ji was also a stranger in the place he returned to.
It was the island he was born on, and he had been away forty-four years.

Both men begot their own form in a land that was not their own.

Or it can be said this way.

Only in a land one has left and arrived at is that land visible.
To one who was there from the beginning, wind is only weather.

To one who returns, wind becomes an event.

Five

A small surface.

The paint is thick.
The wheat is ripe and the sky is heavy.

Crows are scattered.

Move the light and the shadows on the surface move.
The picture changes a little.

So this painting is not yet finished.

On another surface far away an old man stands.
That surface is thin and dry.

One stacked paint and took light.
The other dried color and took wind.

Both brought what was outside the surface into it.

That was the question of this gate.

What does one paint with.

The answer was not one.