The big house across the street sang to him the colors of the early morning. Da di da…
Somewhere unseen, the sun rose, its rays bathing the wall a blazing bright yellow. And he could not help himself. He got up and danced. He danced all over town, through streets and fields, past a draw bridge over a river where women did their laundry, into fields, and then back into town. Da di da…
His dance is easy. It is mostly like painting. One begins by finding one’s center. Let the center sway this way and that, like the swing of a pendulum. The limbs simply follow. Raised arms swing to balance the shift in the center of weight, the center of gravity.
The foot does the same, countering what would be a fall, pushing the balance into the other direction towards the next step. To be soft. To be dancing one step at a time. Always. Da di da…
It is all a question of time. The world is moving but only as fast as the body might move. And so the painting must be made as quickly as the dance.
It is all a question of gesture. The secret is to make the whole body move the brush. To sway this way and that. The paint suggests the dance. The dance suggests the music. People think Vincent Willem Van Gogh a great painter. But before that, he is a great dancer. Da di da…
They say he had a problem keeping a single perspective in his paintings. Was there something wrong with his eyes? But how can there be a single perspective when one is moving about? The perspective shifts because Vincent is never still. He moves. He bobs up and down, keeping time with the music. He spins.
He skips a small distance upwards and then down into a flow like a story as it moves through time. Da di da…
He moves. The world moves with him. Nothing is set in one point in space. Everything spins like the spiraling light of stars and street lamps, like the leaves of trees, the cobblestone streets, the sunflowers on the table. Nothing sits still. Not the light. Not even his own face when he looks at it from a mirror.
They all dance with Vincent, dancing into his canvas, dancing into his world, which he wishes we could only see, though he knows. To see is mostly quite difficult. Da di da…
Why would he paint the world like Jacques Louis David? That world was for him lacking in movement and light, although he grants, it has its own charm, its sterile classicism best loved by those who want their world to sit still so that everything is set in its proper place, no brush stroke visible, until the canvas itself disappears.
David makes us forget his world is made of paint.
While paint is what Vincent loves more than anything else. His paint makes us to see his cotton duck canvas. We see paint on canvas before we see the world they describe. Vincent paints for us a story of how to make color and paint dance to a secret music.
His yellows blazing against the darkest blue of night. How does one see this way? How does one see the way Vincent sees the world? How do we write a story this way?
Time now to join into his dance, to move to his colors, to follow where our feet take us, to hear once again the music playing from his canvas. First, to sit from a chair, to lift one’s self, to get up into the left foot and then to the right bouncing as we go, dancing into the rest of the day, going, da di da…