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DEAR THEO,
The weather here in Provence now an unbroken series of cloudless days and starry nights. I draw the dark writhing lines of cypresses against azure sky, their erect contorted lines breaking like spires the horizontal fields outside Arles.
I can now move my left hand clockwise while rotating my right hand counter-clockwise. This I have practiced in my little room all winter and am able to render—with some semblance of accuracy—a circle. This morning, in one supple turn of wrist, I etched the perfect half dome of Ginoux's haystack. The unhurried squeaking of white knobs filled the groves where I sat and, for the moment, I was at peace.
At dusk I returned to my room above the cafe, carefully holding the Etch-A-Sketch® flat ahead of me. I found Gauguin sitting at the table fondling a slinky and asked him if he could tell where I contoured the horizon line around the foreground cypress—and he could not tell, Theo—he could not tell!
Your Loving Brother,
DEAR THEO,
The townsfolk here in Arles have eyed me strangely from the beginning. They whisper I am possessed by demons and tell their children to keep away from "the crazy Dutchman with the little red screens." They are a simple people who care little for art, but they make excellent bread and placemats.
There is this line dictated by nature and masterable by thumb and index finger. Yet it is technique that can blind one from the true art—that which is projected from the heart and cannot be captured by mere craft. Craft is crippling like a palsy and blinding like a big paper maché rabbit's head. This is what Gauguin said last night—though I believe he was asleep as he muttered it.
DEAR THEO,
Please send me another straw hat. Gauguin sat on the one you sent last month—deliberately, I think. Gauguin possesses a maliciousness I was unaware of until we moved in together. All day he sits in the cafe downstairs and when evening falls he is still there, drinking absinthe beneath the overhead glare of gaslight. He moves his knobs methodically from left to right to left to right until he has cleared off the entire screen—the internal pulleys and gears of the instrument made visible through the glass.
I scuff at his bleak exercises and he explodes in front of the whole cafe.
"This is what the future of art will be, Vincent!" he shouts running around the room with his arms extended, bellowing like a train, "This is how it will all be! Choo-choo!"
Gauguin is some sort of primitive and I tell him so as we are escorted out of the cafe and asked not to return.
Outside on the street, Gauguin continues to run in circles beneath the stars choo-chooing. He says that I am melancholic and hyperactive, he says that I stick my tongue out when I draw difficult things. I run home to bed and when Gauguin enters, some hours later, I do not whisper "Good Night, John-Boy" the way he likes me to.
Yesterday I finished a difficult still life: my crushed straw hat, my pipe and the Danielle Steele novel your lovely wife sent me, all arranged on a chair. Getting the parallel curvatures of the pipe was technically challenging—and in truth, I may have stuck my tongue out a little. I was particularly proud of the foreshortened ellipse of the hat and I showed it to Gauguin when he came home. He grunted and collapsed to the floor, but I believe he thought it was good. When I awoke the next morning the still life had been turned upside down and shaken. I do not think it was an accident, Theo.
Please don't forget about that straw hat—your loving brother,
DEAR THEO,
Gauguin and I had another terrible fight yesterday. When I came home from sketching he was sitting at the table, still in his pajamas, drawing stairs on an Etch-A-Sketch that I spent the day before drawing a vase of sunflowers onto—he was drawing stairs!
"Who the hell wants pictures of sunflowers?" he slurred, "This is the future, Vincent—stairs."
I exploded and told him that rather than sit around my room, drinking my Tang all day, playing on my Etch-A-Sketches…and not cleaning the bathroom like he said he would, perhaps he should go somewhere far away and find some nubile young thing to practice his stairs on.
This I told him.
He sat on my hat. The new straw hat that you sent me, quite maliciously I'm sure of it. He then took the Twister mat—the one we bought together—and left. I have not seen him since.
Please send me another straw hat.
DEAR THEO,
Once again technique blinds me from the heart. I have worked all summer and all I have to show for it are dozens of little gray screens in various states of completion. There is no counter space in my room anymore. Etch-A-Sketches across the bed, under the bed, between the mattresses, under the rug. All day I am stumbling over knobs and in a state of despair last night I broke open an Etch-A-Sketch of Dr. Gachet's daughter, swallowing much of the aluminum filling. It wasn't too bad actually, but I sat on the toilet all night with terrible cramps and this morning I cut my ear shaving and had to be rushed to Ste Rémy.
I returned home this afternoon in wretched shape and turned all my screens upside down, shaking them—except for a drawing of a peach orchard that I made last week. I am pleased with its linework of branches and fence and have sent it to you with careful instructions to Roulin, the postman, to see that it remains flat. I know we have been unsuccessful at this in the past, but maybe this time Roulin will get it through. Thank your lovely wife for the new straw hat, I will begin etching it immediately. Yours.
DEAR THEO,
I have spent all month working on one picture—a wheatfield outside of town. In heavy wind, the Etch-A-Sketch roped to my knees, I draw a field of near-ripened wheat. The wheat glows vermillion and ocher in late summer light against approaching storm clouds and this essence of foreboding I attempt to capture in contour line over and over.
A murder of crows nests among the stalks and when they fly it makes for a difficult rendering—I would prefer if they remained on the ground. It is difficult the line that connects the crow to the ground and a cloud to a field. A dark gray line against gray that connects heaven to earth, an i to its dot, a nose to its mouth—this etched gray line that connects and binds—enslaving me into its confining renderment. Such is the hopelessness of this medium I have chosen.
On days like this my life unravels, Theo, a long gray contour line connecting everything yet disconnected, begging to be inverted and shook. Sometimes we progress so far only to be inverted and shook. To be gray. To be blank.
I would prefer it if the crows remained on the ground.
Your loving brother,
