“As a painter I shall never amount to anything important, I am absolutely sure of it.”
~Vincent Van Gogh

My sister Maureen has long joked that she was the only painting major in law school. Maureen earned her B.A. in Fine Arts at Syracuse University, focusing on painting. Her classes included art history, 2D, 3D, figure drawing, photography, landscape painting, still-life drawing, stained glass, and so much more. Before she left for college, Maureen wanted to paint a mural in our garage inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Our parents gave the go-ahead. Our grandparents bought the paint. (Grandma Mary was a self-taught artist and painted some amazing pictures herself). Maureen didn’t want her Starry Night to be an exact copy of Vincent Van Gogh’s. She altered the color scheme a bit. It was a blast to help Maureen with this creative expression, to be Theo to her Vincent. And I can honestly say I’ve loved Van Gogh ever since!

“With all these elements—cypress tree, townscape, hills, horizon—secured in his imagination, Vincent’s brush launched into the sky. Unconstrained by sketches, unschooled by a subject in front of him, unbounded by perspective frame, unbiased by ardor, his eye was free to meditate on the light—the fathomless, ever-comforting light he always saw in the night sky.”

I recently finished reading Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. This book was well-researched with the full cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The authors detail Vincent’s life-long struggle to find a place in the world and share many direct quotes from the letters sent back and forth between Vincent and his brother Theo. The book also explores Vincent’s tumultuous romantic life, his struggle with mental illness and experiences in asylums, and the suspicious circumstances surrounding Vincent’s death.

“I am a traveler,” Vincent wrote, “going somewhere and to some destination…[only] the somewhere and the destination do not exist.”

This week I wanted to share a bit about Vincent Van Gogh because art has a way of humanizing us. Art helps us access our inner worlds emotionally and psychologically. We are not living in an easy era. Sometimes the artists, the poets, the dreamers, the sensitive souls among us may suffer the most in times like these. I would like to think that if Vincent Van Gogh lived in modernity he would have been treated with more compassion than what he experienced during his lifetime. Though to think that someone who suffered so greatly and never really found his place in the world has brought so much joy to so many, that feels somehow miraculous.

Love,
Pastor Lauren

*As an aside, we are so lucky in Connecticut to have some amazing art museums. If you’re ever interested in viewing some Vincent Van Gogh masterpieces close by, you can find several pieces at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven (Square Saint-Pierre, Paris; Le café de nuit (The Night Cafe); Orchard Bordered by Cypresses) and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford (Self-Portrait, 1887; Vase with Poppies).

Thursday Thoughts 1/22/26