Dear Kait,
By chance I see that a new movie is coming out soon -
I find it comforting that in many of my transitional life phases Mr Van Gogh has seemingly been at my side, guiding me to the place that I have been searching for and will eventually reach - Eternity's Gate.
When
I graduated college with a business-useless degree
(history/philosophy), at the age of 25 (I took the loooonnnng road to my
degree), even though I found it difficult to find a job, and for 5
months I searched with no decent offers, I did not give up hope. On the
weekends I would visit Ward on his farm and we would talk, drink wine,
read poetry, listen to music, and hike in the nearby woods. During the
week I slogged a night job on the trucking docks, and I even had a fling
with a co-worker. One day after work (3:00am) she approached me and
asked if I wanted to go to Denny's (the only all night restaurant in
those parts). I agreed and for the next month made it a habit to hang
out together after work and we would invariably watch from my car window
the sun rise on another suburban workday.
During the days
I would search for a job, and sometimes I would take the train into
downtown Chicago. I would bring my camera along, at Ward's
encouragement, and having no knowledge of art, I would try to see things
more deeply than normal. After a 5 mile urban trek/hike northwards, I
would stop at the Why Not Cafe on Belmont Street. The owners would be
sitting at a window table playing chess, and above them on the wall was
this painting -
Around that time I happened to be wandering through the book stacks at the local college library, and I came across The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Unfortunately, I only saw volume II, and having no idea what the book was about, or who van Gogh was, I checked the book out and discovered inside the cover a collection of letters which were colored with truth and spoke to me directly, and I felt like a man who comes across a desert oasis by chance after walking for days under a hot sun with no water - refreshed, inspired, and feeling that I had been given a fresh chance at life's journey. I decided that I would read 1 letter per night, while laying in bed, before going to sleep. As the months went by and the letters seeped into me slowly, my camera wanderings took on added significance and meaning to me.
Around that time I happened to be wandering through the book stacks at the local college library, and I came across The Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Unfortunately, I only saw volume II, and having no idea what the book was about, or who van Gogh was, I checked the book out and discovered inside the cover a collection of letters which were colored with truth and spoke to me directly, and I felt like a man who comes across a desert oasis by chance after walking for days under a hot sun with no water - refreshed, inspired, and feeling that I had been given a fresh chance at life's journey. I decided that I would read 1 letter per night, while laying in bed, before going to sleep. As the months went by and the letters seeped into me slowly, my camera wanderings took on added significance and meaning to me.
I
continued searching for work, and my journeys into the city fascinated
me. I had never traveled before, but I felt a dormant seed inside my
heart which was beginning to expand and grow, and so I imagined that if I
wanted to one day travel to far away places, I had to first travel to
the nearby ones, and Chicago being a large, interesting city, was the
first place which I traveled to. One late summer's day I was wandering
around near the Art Institute and I happened to pass the Fine Arts
building, which at that time had an art theater which showed art films.
The movie poster outside the theater was -
The
last time I had seen a movie in a movie house was with Rick when I was
in college, and he invited me to see a cheesy sci-fi. Even though I had
little money, usually not more than $20 in my pocket at any time, having
recently been reading 1 Van Gogh letter per night, I felt myself being
tugged into the theater, and after parting with a precious $7 settled
into the darkness with 10 or 15 others. On the screen for the next 2
hours I watched scenes of astounding beauty and pain, triumph and
failure. After leaving the theater I decided to hike to the Why Not and
take another look at the Van Gogh portrait hanging above the chess
players.
On November 1st 1991 I started a new job in downtown Chicago, and my coworkers happened to all be artists of some sort. I felt that Van Gogh had something to do with this fortuitous turn of events. A few months before I was surrounded by a vast gray suburban wasteland of shops and malls, warehouses, factories, and cars, and considered chucking it away and starting fresh in California (Ward let me borrow his orange rucksack for the journey west but a week before I was to leave my car broke down and I took that as a sign that I needed to hang around Chicago and wait for better prospects). But now all was new inside and outside of my eyes - I was working in the historic Monadnock building -
surrounded by trains, large masses of people, artists, a few blocks from the Art Institute of Chicago, where on Tuesdays (free day) I would visit after work and gaze at this portrait -
2
months later I decided to dedicate the next 10 years of my life to
art/photography. Some of the photos I made that first year, 1992, looked
like this -
and I even made a few portraits of Ward as the years began to pass -
and I even made a few portraits of Ward as the years began to pass -
and one of his paintings -
and began to draw to help my eyes see more details in everyday life -
