Here’s what I love about art: It reminds the viewer of their own memories.
Here’s the crazy thing about art: I am able to find pieces of myself (that I lost, that I rediscovered, that are new) in a flat image made up of chaotic drips and flailings of chemicals in random colors.
In “How Art Can Prepare You for Suffering” on The Gospel Coalition’s website, Dustin Messer discusses how going to an art gallery and letting yourself revel in the beauty that art has to offer is a gateway to being able to more easily identify emotions, in particular those that come along with suffering, because of our exposure to the beauty present in art. Messer writes,
“We’ll only be able to make sense of the world’s ugliness in moments of crisis if we first try to make sense of the world’s beauty in moments of transcendent joy. Dealing with the problem of pleasure will prepare us for the problem of pain.”
In his eyes, the qualities developed in a viewer who interprets a work of art are the same tools that allow them to similarly dissect their pain: “Not only can a deep familiarity with the beautiful give us the standard by which we recognize and name the ugly, but once we’ve become accustomed to looking for meaning in moments of joy, perhaps we can also see with eyes of faith in moments of despair.” Delving into the traumatic to look for significance in a healthy way comes naturally when you’ve practiced on beautiful works of art like Piet Mondrian’s mind-bending contemporary color and line work, Claude Monet’s dreamy impressions of haystacks, or Pablo Picasso’s wonky but surprisingly communicative outlines of women.
I won’t give away any more of his article (because you all should head on over there to read it yourself!) but the rest of this blog post is a piggyback on Messer’s idea. I finished his article satisfied that he understands the mental dexterity of people who can interpret art and apply it to their own life, but what he doesn’t go into is how art can be ugly (or perhaps more accurately: unappealing to certain viewers), how art can be inspired by horrific events in someone’s life, and how art can be extremely uncomfortable to witness.
My junior year of college, I wasn’t planning on going home for spring break. However, when I heard that the Art Institute of Chicago was hosting “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms,” an exhibition that displayed for the first time all three paintings of Vincent van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles, France, I immediately booked my ticket. The stories of his tortured, mentally and emotionally unstable life fascinated me, and it was time for me to learn more about the artist whose art people couldn’t stop raving about.
Walking through the exhibit and learning more about van Gogh’s life was inspiring on a whole new level. There was a curving ink painting of a tree with a little house in the distance, those incredible brightly colored oil paintings of van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles, and a striking self-portrait of van Gogh wearing a brown jacket in front of a stirring teal background. Admiring the variety of his styles and subject matter proved to me that he was even more of a complex human and artist than I had anticipated.
My favorite part of the exhibition, though, came at the end. In the last room of the exhibit, dim lighting and dark grey walls contrasted the bright tones of the paintings that lined the walls. The subject of these paintings? Saint-Rémy, the asylum where van Gogh admitted himself in May 1889 after several tortured months of hallucinations and delusions. Van Gogh himself wrote that during that time he experienced
“moods of indescribable anguish, […] moments when the veil of time and fatality of circumstances seemed to be torn apart for an instant.”
As I walked around the room, my eyes were drawn to one painting in particular: “Hospital at Saint-Rémy,” painted in the same year of his admission to the converted Augustine monastery. It shows beautiful, swirling, green trees towering up over the astonishingly yellow wall of the asylum. The ground beneath the trees is a jaw-dropping shade of burnt umber, and behind the orange roof of the building, the sky transforms from a whimsical light blue to an emotive sapphire, the color I imagine the deep ocean to be where the sunlight can barely reach. I found myself paralyzed in front of this painting, awestruck by the luminescent beauty of the scene, tears in my eyes. What possibly could have possessed this man who was rejected by those around him, tormented by his own mind, and who produced artwork that expresses such otherworldly emotions of peace and beauty? And of a place that he could have so easily associated with sadness, confusion, and loneliness!
Looking at that painting, no matter how beautiful it is, wasn’t easy for me. It reminded me of the places I associate with the kind of excruciating healing that van Gogh attempted to stir within himself while he was at Saint-Rémy. Witnessing van Gogh’s choice to paint a place that people looked down their nose upon, and with such vibrancy and unflinching emotional clarity, was a lightning bolt to my mind—it was a tough reminder that I too cannot judge the hard places of my own life, but that I should regard them with fondness. Those dark, despairing places are massive landmarks on my journey to become the person I am today, after all.
Witnessing van Gogh’s choice to paint a place that people looked down their nose upon, and with such vibrancy and unflinching emotional clarity, was a lightning bolt to my mind
My point in explaining this is to say that looking at most works of art will make you cringe. Not only are some of them difficult to physically look at (e.g., “Picture of Dorian Grey” by Ivan Albright—try to look at that and not feel your lunch inching upwards), but they can make the viewer feel things that she really did not want to feel, or bewilder the onlooker with new revelations of feelings she didn’t know she could have. A lot of Jackson Pollock’s work, like “Number 10, 1949” or “Troubled Queen” with their dark splashes and violent slashes of paint, bring out whole new emotions in the observer that don’t surface often. (Can’t help but mention that the massive, overwhelming brushstrokes of cream and black in “Probst I” by Franz Kline also make me feel the new sensations of raw energy, overpowering dichotomies, and yet also balance.)
Here is the revelation: artwork birthed from times of sorrow not only helps the viewer to enter into their own memories of pain, but gives them new words and feelings to process it. While it’s important to “recognize and name the ugly,” as Messer writes, it is even more important to have vehicles to methodically express the emotions that are brought to the surface by that recognition.
Artwork birthed from times of sorrow not only helps the viewer to enter into their own memories of pain, but gives them new words and feelings to process it.
In beautiful paintings like van Gogh’s where we know that behind the scenes he was actually in a thorny period of his life, as well as paintings that exude violent, perplexing, or gut-wrenching images or emotions, we are given the tools to be able to make something of and from our own grief. As a result of my observation of “Hospital at Saint-Rémy,” I found myself with new words and ideas to describe those breakthroughs in my life that were previously shadowed in seemingly hopeless fog. Van Gogh’s chaotic and simultaneously calculated brushstrokes and color choices give me new terminology to process the complex emotions that resurface when I look into my past and attempt to understand an upsetting scenario.
This act of vulnerability in opening up old wounds to better express them outwardly (e.g., through practical application or as an art form) gets us closer to the people God wants us to be. Because the Lord doesn’t want us to hold our pain in—he created us to jump, shout, dance, cry, and interact with trauma. One of my favorite psalms reads:
I cry aloud to God, aloud to God; and he hears me. On the day of my distress I am seeking Adonai; my hands are lifted up; my tears flow all night without ceasing; my heart refuses comfort. When remembering God, I moan; when I ponder, my spirit fails. (Psalm 77:1–3 CJB)
Just as the author of Psalm 77 expresses their depression and lack of hope, we too should delve into our suffering, try to understand it, and create something from it.
The more adeptly we can interact with expressions of distress, the better we will be at accepting those complex emotions within ourselves and conveying them in a healthy way. In the cases of van Gogh, Kline, Pollock, and even Ivan Albright—and very likely our own as well—the manifestation of anguish in their artwork can and will positively impact others’ abilities to process the traumatic events of their lives.
Some take-aways for you:
Research the art or the artist that you’re looking at. The artist’s life story, while not always relevant to the piece, can sometimes be just as inspiring as the work of art itself.
Try to confront art that makes you uncomfortable. There’s beauty in everything, including the raw expression of someone’s hurt. Sit in the ache of that manifestation.
Avoid shying away from the communication of your own agony. We were made with emotions, and it pleases God when we bring those feelings to him in prayer or in a creative way, such as writing, poetry, music, painting, knitting, and so on.