The Crows in the Wheat Field
Wheat Field with Crows
Vincent William van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh
Through the dark glass, everything is still in the mirror:
Life is parting, passing away, and constant upheaval—and beyond that, we don't know anything else about life. For me, life will continue to be lonely. I never felt like I was more dependent on anyone than through the dark glass.
Van Gogh's homeless outfit, unkempt beard, self-trimmed hairstyle, vague accent, all show his wandering, shabby and hard work. As in Al, and anywhere else he had been, the local inhabitants of Ovie still avoided him. They didn't know what Van Gogh had done in Al and what had happened in the past, but they knew everything when they saw his broken ears. Local hooligans chased him all over the streets, children yelled at him, they added salt to his coffee, snakes in his painting box, and no one wanted to be his model. These moments are a reminder of van Gogh's harsh realities of the past and present.
The Crows in the Wheat Field, considered by many to be his last work. The overcast, cloudy sky was filled with black crows, suggesting that a storm was coming. The abrupt interruption of green and brown trails in golden wheat fields is full of drama and frenzied panic. At first glance it seems easy to get into, and it doesn't conflict much with our visual expectations. But at the second glance, our perspective becomes a little blurred, and the perspective of the picture is once again subverted. That road has no direction, no end, no vanishing point. The side path also has no clear direction. All of our visual experiences are useless.
It is a critique of artistic clichés, a contempt for rules, denigrating the history of the landscape, perspective (the illusion of creating depth of field), so that the viewer's gaze can move firmly to the distant horizon. Subverting perspective, an unending path that causes us to interpret visual signals and assumptions disintegrate in an instant.
As natural forces emerge, the devil disappears.
The colors are thickly arranged on the screen, as if they are squandered, and there is no time to reconcile. White clouds, blue sky, yellow wheat fields, everything has been restored to its original pure form. Here nature transforms into a colorful wall, where the colors seem to tremble, pulsate, and sway. The picture is no longer a deeper space that takes the viewer into it, but is like a roller blind. We seem to be caught up in thick twisted lines. We are engulfed alive in the picture and in nature.
Van Gogh opened up modern art with these vivid patches of color. We stand like Van Gogh in the middle of a wheat field, where there are many foraging crows, they are disturbed, and they fly away in groups, seemingly paved with dark clouds in the sky. We are completely immersed in the vitality of nature, and the excitement aroused makes us forget the loneliness in modern society.
Exactly what led van Gogh to end his life with a gun on that day remains a mystery. Although in a recently published biography, the author claims that Van Gogh was injured by mistake by a local boy, it is difficult to shake the accepted fact that Van Gogh died by suicide.
On Sunday, July 27, Van Gogh walked trembling back to the inn from the fields outside Ovi, dragging his badly injured body up to the bedroom on the second floor and lying quietly on the bed. The innkeeper asked him what had happened. "I'm injured," he replied, and lifted his shirt to show the boss a small bullet hole under his ribs. "Exactly what happened, no one knows.
Gacher was still unusually conscious when he saw Van Gogh after hearing about the shooting—he was still in a daze—he was still waiting to smoke his pipe and ask the doctor to remove the bullet from his abdomen. Theo arrived, and the brothers embraced and immediately had a long conversation in Dutch. But my brother could no longer go to the small studio behind the downstairs to complete two unfinished paintings...
The last words he left for his dear brother Theo were, "I want to die like this."
Van Gogh believed until his death that people could not only admire his paintings, but also feel the vitality of them. The strength and dazzling colors of his pen, with his own experience and feelings, the fields, faces and flowers in his paintings are beyond the reach of other delicate and elegant works.
In his early years, he often accompanied his father, who was a pastor, to pray and give speeches to the deceased, comforting the relatives of the deceased and reading the Bible for them. He was intimately familiar with funeral scenes, as well as the imagery of funerals, plagues, and the god of death, and described the deceased as "so unforgettable that the noble head lying on the pillow was so unforgettable; There was a slight pain on his face, but there was serenity, even a hint of sacredness", "compared with us living people, the dead seem to be more calm, solemn, and dignified".
Perhaps, at Van Gogh's own funeral, as the deceased, he was the same, "like not dying but falling asleep, which makes people feel precious."
Recommended reading
Van Gogh:
The Faith Unleashed by Paint Fights Madness with Art
Introduction:
In Art and Faith
A recorder of the life of the times between madness and redemption
Usher in a new era of art
He has always had "a heart of gold"
Sincere, sincere, innocent, simple and benevolent
He was driven by such a spirit to redeem
Seeking and creating...
He tried to use colors and pigments
to capture the sense of loneliness and marginalization that he found
About the Author:
Cheng Yin is a freelance author and translator, majoring in Western aesthetics and art history. He is the editor and author of art and philosophy columns, and the author of "Introduction to the Taste of Chinese Opera" and "Chinese People's Instructions: Chinese Art".