A Crime of the Senses

'Some artist’s have a nervous hand at drawing, which give their technique something of the peculiar sound of a violin, for instance Lancon, Lemud, Daumier. Gavarni and Bodmer remind one more of piano playing. Millet is perhaps a solemn organ.'~~ Vincent Van Gogh, in a letter to his brother Theo 

I did something naughty. It was explicitly against the rules and I have nothing but the utmost respect for the rules. Yet I couldn’t help myself. I claimed no actual right to do it nor did I claim to possess any special privilege to do it. I can safely say I did not do it simply for the sake of getting away with it. I just simply possessed this overwhelming, sweeping, unquenchable desire to do what I did. I touched the Van Gogh. There it hung by a mere couple of nails so majestically, so worthy of its ornamental frame and adoration of the ever present crowds. I chose my moment with the utmost precision and care. I swept the room for every security person within eyeshot. I knew of where all heads where at any given moment and I gauged for every eye that might lay on me. It was time. James Bond time.


I was utterly calculating in my scheming. My mathematical efficiency surprised even myself. Bond might have blushed. However in a moment of all this planning, I thought how absurd this whole covert dance was in attempting to touch a painting. The impulse seemed ludicrous to want to touch a painting that hung right before my eyes. It was a sight to be enjoyed not an object to be groped. But this is no simple picture. There it was. Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfields with Cypress Trees on the wall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art so very within my reach yet seemingly a million miles away. Many adoring eyes come to the Met to view all the great work it has to offer but there can be no denying the multitudes perpetually surrounding the poor Dutchman’s picture. I started wondering about this man whom I had read so much about. I remembered his dire poverty and his grappling with mental illness and the very popular notions by many a poet and scholar alike that he was just too sensitive for this world. Most of all, I remembered his solitude and thought that maybe it is very difficult to be locked up in one’s own senses for a length of time without the possibility of expressing them.

This was the absurdity. The more I thought on it, the more I realized he might have allowed me to touch the picture. It might at first seem an odd request until I thought that possibly, just possibly, he would understand my urge. Maybe with a slight flick of the wrist and a chuckle, he might have acquiesced. But this is all assumptions. He is not here to grant me permission or otherwise. I should call it wishful thinking if it were not such an evident daydream. There I was again placing myself outside the confines of my own time and space in hopes of finding solace in another. When will I learn, I think to myself. If Van Gogh failed to find solace in his does it really matter the time? Aren’t we all living lives of quiet desperation waiting for inspiration? Pondering the past does nothing in seizing the present.

My mind returned to the gallery where I stood and I noticed at once the dispersement of the crowd. Coupled with the inattention of the guards, I realized all my scheming gave way to a stroke of luck. I made my move. I swept my hand as delicately as I could muster along the ochre coloured wheat fields saturating the bottom of the painting. At once, my fingertips felt the opacity of the thick paint as it protruded in relief from the flatness of the canvas. Van Gogh’s paintings are so thickly painted in some areas they resemble more wall sculpture in their three-dimensional excess.

I have always held the notion that his paintings are worthy of the blind to enjoy. If I had closed my eyes, I might have been reading very beautiful Braille. I could feel where the paint had hardened in to thick masses as if every stock of wheat was its own glob of carefully placed paint. My finger felt as if moving through peaks and valleys riding in and out of crevices that were at once bare canvas then thickly condensed paint. I then rode my hand up the outline of the green Cypress tree that dominates the right side of the canvas and rises like a flame tickling VanGogh’s azure and purple Arlesian sky above. The outline of the cypress is also a thick stroke of paint reaching from the bottom to the pinnacle of the tree as if Van Gogh willed it in his work to be as sturdy as found in nature.

I could distinctly feel the rough, opaque nature of undiluted paint. I felt as if I were a god following with the tip of his giant, omnipotent hand the length of a mini mountain range. I took my hand to the bare areas of the canvas. I could feel the dimpled roughness where there was next to no paint at all. The “whoosh” of sound made by the canvas surface I thought echoed through the halls of the great building. The swishing noise of my hand over the bare areas I perceived echoing into other chambers of the Metropolitan rooms leaving me utterly self-conscious until I realized I was lost in my own heightened sensations. I did not want to stop though Idid.

A beautiful painting whether a Van Gogh or otherwise is meant to be viewed. The eyes act as a window sending a sensation through the whole body in search of the spirit. But I could never stop my mind wondering that he painted so thickly for another sense to be enjoyed. It seemed to be crying out for touch. This time I wanted to feel the sensations from the nerve centers of my fingertips. Instead of a route from the cornea of the eye, I wanted to start from the sensation of the tips of my finger. I found that no matter the starting point, the route still leads straight to the seat of the soul. The feel of the painting is sensational. Somehow touching the painting felt as real as looking. It was tangible. This paint taken on the end of a brush and placed with great care at by a man so desirous of expressing himself with every touch of the canvas, I was now touching.

I felt at a moment as if there were connections over a wide waste of years as if somehow by touching the very paint Van Gogh had touched somehow made us closer. A poor but passionate man felt an artistic urge to place this wet paint on a canvas and here I was, over a hundred years after the fact, standing in an ornate room in a large museum touching the same paint. The paint may have dried over the many years but the inspiration has not.

I took this inspiration home with me. My mind, swimming with the thoughts of Van Gogh’s works and my senses filled with paint, I made my way to my own small art studio. It is a cramped little area filled with debris as if left over from a hurricane. Bits of old newspaper and ripped pages of magazines litter the floor, images used and then discarded. Old coffee cans line the shelf filled with old, unusable but somehow indispensable brushes. The cans and brushes are blanketed with a half-inch worth of dust accumulated over months like a fungal growth. I could not help but notice on this day the film of dust actually give the objects an almost ethereal quality as if light as feathers. I often blamed this cramped and littered condition on my lack of inspiration at those agonizing times when I had none.

On this day however, I realized any lack of inspiration had to do with locking my senses away from this real and actual environment. On this day, all were beautiful objects glistening in the sunlight. The sight of my studio at once gave over to the scents always so apparent in the studio. The advances of our modern age have helped create an odorless turpentine but the fact is remnants of the scent still emanate even from even the best quality turpentine. Anyone not familiar with a painter’s studio will readily attest to this. Yet the smell oddly does not offend. People who visit me regularly remark on it and even coyly confess to liking it in that same perverse way people admit to liking the scent of gasoline.

My heightened senses on this day decided to track these scents further. Different paints have different aromas due to the different plants and oils that go in to the manufacturing of the paints. I picked up a tube of alizarin crimson and noted the strong aroma of flowers so often used for red colours. The pleasing scent is only hampered by the oily smell. Ultramarine blue like most blues has a sharp odor most likely due to the acrid plants that go into making it. All of this somehow blended in to something I can only call the scent of an artist’s studio.

My paintings, some finished some half-finished, lay strewn on the floor. Some leaned on the walls. I sometimes laugh to myself that they never quite make it to hanging on the walls but are rather always leaning as if an understudy actor waiting for his moment in the wings. Poor Van Gogh never saw his players center stage. I began to wonder if there might be a time when these very paintings might themselves hang somewhere where they might be deemed untouchable. But the thought was too ridiculous to seriously ponder. I inspected them closely. Like VanGogh, I try to paint in a thick, opaque technique that requires a constant building up of the paint over time. It is a multi-layered business that takes some patience. The paintings too, I noticed started accumulating a good layer laying over the thick impasto of paint like soft tissue over engravings.

I felt compelled to paint but I did not want to paint a proper picture more than I just wanted to feel the sensation of painting again. This led me to squeeze some tubes of paint onto a palette and then found myself an untouched canvas on which to paint. Nothing is more frightening than the blank canvas. It must be the equivalent of a blank piece of paper for the writer. It is a paralyzing thought to see this blank space and then to think that it somehow must be filled with a masterpiece but I was oddly less interested in filling the canvas than I was filling my artistic spirit with a desire to paint. I wanted the inspiration with the hopes that a masterpiece might follow.

I took some dry paint on a brush and just freely scumbled the paint on the canvas. The sound of the brush on a blank canvas was as electrifying as my fingers on the Van Gogh. The energetic whooshing sound of brush on virginal was a magical moment reminding me of all the reasons for excitement in starting something new. All the senses are stimulated anew by the thought of a new work. I then took some paint diluted with turpentine and violently spread a line of paint over the canvas. The “swoosh” of the brush on the canvas echoed the animation of the stroke. My senses, so preoccupied with painting, forgot the desire for food.

I went to the kitchen and hastily placed cuts of ham and some Swiss cheese in between two slices of rye bread. One of the rye pieces I slathered with mustard rather foolishly pretending I was covering a painting. To wash it down, I poured some old wine into a glass. It seemed appropriate somehow to be drinking wine this day. I took my food and drink into the studio slightly fearful that the inspiration might leave me if I were not in the vicinity of the room. I ate my sandwich, spying the room for my muse like a jealous lover. I was soon led out of this stupor by the foreign taste of my sandwich. There was something more than just ham and swiss.

I looked down to see my hands were stained with different colours of paint mingling with my sandwich. I could taste the tinny tang of titanium white as it mingled with my mustard. All the remnants of the paint from my fingers tasted bitter to the tongue. The wine too tasted like colour as it burned in my throat.

I thought to myself: Was this you, too Vangogh? I laughed to myself. Not long ago, I was in despair at finding the inspiration to paint. I often thought of those great painters I read about who lived and breathed their art at the expense of everything else in life and here I was ingesting it as well. What an oddly satisfying way of finding inspiration. I hope it works again.