VAN GOGH



See the painter on his way to work al fresco,

Toting bags with an easel under his arm, 

His straw hat gold as the cobbled road in sunlight,

And that dark, constant companion, his shadow.

He passes the peasants reaping or sowing in fields,

Bent dark over their tools from daybreak to sunset

Before finding his place and the day’s way to work.

When his feet stop walking, his hands start to paint,

For it is his way to work, work, work:

Presto, stroke, dab, smear, swirl, impasto,

In a perpetual motion at one with his eye;

Work, work, work and the pictures come:

Presto, stroke, dab, smear, swirl, impasto,

As the world rolls and turns around him,

The wheat and clouds and trees,

Rocks and farmlands and furrows

Radiate through sunlight to twilight,

Past long shadows and low crows

Whose black wings bring the storm

Into the world’s changing form,

Through moonlight to starlight,

Dusk to dawnlight.

C. 2012 IGR

Van Gogh has always been one of my favourite artists. We’ve been to Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam a couple of times and the paintings are even more stunning close-up in three dimensions. The accompanying picture here ‘The Painter on his Way To Work’, comes from one of the happier times of his life when he believed he might set up an artists’ colony in France. Like so many things in his short life, it didn’t work out.

The picture was the initial inspiration for the poem and is reproduced here courtesy of Google Images.