Van Gogh: from absence to creation
- Amanda
- Aug 22
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 5
One of the things that most enchanted me during my visit to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris was coming closer to the story and brushstrokes of Van Gogh. La Méridienne caught my eye and held me for long minutes in contemplation and reflection.
Van Gogh painted La Méridienne during his time at the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Confined to his room, trapped in a repetitive “same” day after day, the artist confronted the anguish of inspiration’s absence amid his ever-burning desire to paint.
Without landscapes or new scenes to nourish him, Vincent felt blocked in his creative flow.
Painting, for him, was not a mere craft—it was his most vital way of being. Amid anguish and absence, comings and goings, it was through the line that he found ground—even when the world around him felt arid and monotonous.
He turned inward, searching within his own thoughts for a path back to creation. Guided by artistic memory, he encountered Jean-François Millet’s Sleeping Peasants—a moment of rural rest, a glimpse of 1860s France.
Van Gogh chose to paint it—embracing repetition not as limitation, but as a means to take up the brush again and bring color back to the canvas. He recreated the work. And in recreating it, something of himself overflowed. The artist infused the gesture and took command of a process that began as simple imitation. Once again, he became an inventor. The scene became his—personally transcribed, marked by the singular intensity of Van Gogh’s art.
His creative presence bursts forth, inevitable: it rises in the lines, in the colors, in his unique way of saying himself through art. Representation opens up to invention—a pulsating, living inscription in the work.
Deep blue for the sky, incandescent yellow for the earth—rest now pulses, serenity burns. The scene lies still, yet it vibrates. Time is suspended, yet alive. In the fiery hues of blue and yellow, absence transforms into creation. The line, which seemed to repeat, becomes a passageway for what escapes from the artist: his creative, ever-creating presence.
It is less about translating a work, and more about rendering in the language of color the impressions of light and shadow in black and white.
Excerpt from a letter by Van Gogh to his brother, Theo: https://www.musee-orsay.fr/fr/oeuvres/la-meridienne-750
His line, therefore, refuses to be confined by imitation. On the contrary, it summons the irrepressible presence of the artist—a call to the gaze, to desire, to the invention of a world of his own.
