ABSTRACT
The authors, two sisters, a psychoanalyst and a writer, met at the writer's home in Provence, what Frenchmen call the midi. The sisters drive into St Remy through an alley of gnarled plane trees whose canopy protects the travellers from the sun's intensity. They remark to each other on their impression that Vincent Van Gogh is everywhere. Van Gogh's work is highly evocative, bringing them to the level at which they understand basic meanings, such as affect, which is recognised by its pattern, and communicated through its prosody. In looking at the black and white renderings of the exhibit in Arles, they are caught by the kinetic energy of the patterning in the drawings. Van Gogh's art captures some essence of this dilemma. Grounded in his own heritage of Dutch aestheticism, Van Gogh's work takes them back to the primacy of their own earliest experiences that are fundamentally sensory.
