Vincent van Gogh, "Landscape with Houses and Old Vineyard with Peasant Woman"
The line that makes the headline is Antony’s, from William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. But it made me think, as I head to bed at the start of my birthday, of Vincent van Gogh — and, more specifically, some of his drawings.
The van Gogh drawings are beautiful, and the “blue” drawings — done near the end of his life — are all the more so. They are crushingly accurate at portraying — at getting across — his despair at that time.
But, I saw them as hopeful, in a way, when I viewed the two of them on display at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005. I saw them as the perfect connection of van Gogh’s mind to his media. Nothing, as I think of it, could be a greater accomplishment for an artist than that. In that way, I saw these not as depressing works but as van Gogh’s greatest works.
His desires required expressing his thoughts to the world on paper, on canvas, with oil paints, with pencil, with ink. With the accomplishment of drawings like the “blue” ones, so his desires were his.
And so must our desires be ours.
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Chris Geidner is the award-winning senior political editor at D.C.'s Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, The American Prospect, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications, as well as at his blog, Law Dork. In 2011, he received the Excellence in News Writing Award from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his coverage of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal. Prior to moving to D.C. in 2009, he served as an attorney on the senior staff at the Ohio Attorney General's Office and had earlier worked for a leading Columbus law firm. An extended biography can be found