Maps of his love

‘And I have an ENORMOUS amount of drawing to do, because I’d like to do drawings in the style of Japanese prints’. In Arles, Van Gogh rediscovered the reed pen, which could be used to make supple yet bold lines. This was the perfect tool to help him develop his own drawing style. (from Tweet by the Van Gogh Museum)

John Berger, in The Shape of a Pocket,

I can think of no other European painter whose work expresses such a stripped respect for everyday things without elevating them, in some way, without referring to salvation by way of an ideal which the things embody or serve. Chardin, de la Tour, Courbet, Monet, de Stal. Miro, Jasper Johns - to name but a few - were all magisterially sustained by pictorial ideologies, whereas he, as soon as he abandoned his first vocation as a preacher, abandoned all ideology. He became strictly existential, ideologically naked. The chair is a chair, not a throne. The boots have been worn by walking. The sunflowers are plants, not constellations. The postman delivers letters. The irises will die. And from this nakedness of his, which his contemporaries saw as naivety or madness, came his capacity to love, suddenly and at any moment, what he saw in front of him. Picking up pen or brush, he then strove to realise, to achieve that love. Lover-painter affirming the toughness of an everyday tenderness we all dream of in our better moments and instantly recognise when it is framed

It's in ink, drawn with a reed-pen. He made many such drawings in a single day. Sometimes, like this one, direct from nature, sometimes from one of his own paintings, which he had hung on the wall of the room, whilst the paint was drying.

Drawings like these were not so much prepatory studies as graphic hopes, they showed in a simpler way -- without the complication of handling pigment -- where the act of painting could hopefully lead him.  They were his maps of love.

What do we see? Thyme, other shrubs, limestone rocks, olive trees on a hillside, in the distance a plain, in the sky birds. He dips the pen into brown ink, watches, and marks the paper. The gestures come from his hand, his wrist, arm, shoulder, perhaps even the muscles in his neck, yet the strokes he makes on the paper are following currents of energy which are not physically his and which only become visible when he draws them. Currents of energy? The energy of a tree's growth, of a plant's search of  light, of a branch's need for accommodation with its neighboring branches, of the roots of thistles and shrubs, of the weight of rocks lodged on a slop, of the sunlight, of the attraction of the shade for whatever is alive and suffers from the heat, of the Mistral from the north which has fashioned the rock strata.  My list is arbitrary; what is not arbitrary is the pattern his strokes make on the paper. The pattern is like a fingerprint.  Whose?

It is a drawing which values precision -- every stroke is explicit and unambiguous -- yet it has totally forgotten itself in its openness to what it has met. And the meeting is so close you can't tell whose trace is whose. a map of love indeed.