Van Gogh in the Quantum Fields (566 words)

I had been reading about dark matter, about how there is no such thing as empty space in outer space. How reality is not made of tiny, solid particles like billiard balls, but vibrations in underlying fields of energy called quantum fields, which are the most fundamental layer of known physics. How we ourselves are not solid matter, but part of the structure of these fields, like ripples in a vast, invisible ocean. How everything in the universe, us included, is swimming around in—is inseparable from—energies that we cannot see.

I was thinking about how “heaven” could be a metaphor for these quantum fields, which are all around us, right here, right now, only we can’t perceive them.

And then I saw this painting, and I thought: maybe Van Gogh, presumably without knowing it, was thinking about the same thing.

Towards the end of his life, Van Gogh made a series of 10 paintings based on black-and-white engravings by Jean-François Millet, an artist who had always inspired him. The copies are translations into color, into his style, of scenes of travaux des champs (work in the fields). Van Gogh’s brother Theo said they were some of his finest work: “Copied like that, it’s no longer a copy.”

The figure in The Sheaf-Binder (1889) exists in a roiling field of matter, the shape of his body echoed by the shape of his surroundings. There is so much fluidity in the image—the figure himself, trying to gather it all up in his arms, his pose almost like a modern dancer, and these swirling mounds of—something—surrounding him, their liquid movement like bubbling stew or the surface of the ocean. 

These churning, hay-yellow waveforms suggest a certain futility to our sheaf binder’s gathering action. No matter how many armfuls he tries to scoop up, the stuff that surrounds him will remain infinite, ineffable, spilling out all over the place. How keenly familiar! We are always trying to gather everything up, gather up life and nature and time and consciousness into some comprehensible sense of purpose. The effort is constant, and we are constantly reminded that we can never get there; there will always be more to gather, more to understand. How frustrating. How beautiful.

True, I don’t know for sure whether Van Gogh was thinking about the mystery of existence or the nature of physical matter when he made this painting. But I do know that artists see the world in ways other people do not. Artists see things differently. And it’s possible—and certainly looks this way to me—that Van Gogh was unconsciously depicting the idea, now established as quantum physics, that we exist within an infinite, interconnected fabric of reality, and that we are not separate from that reality, however isolated and alone we may sometimes feel.

He was making copies of other works at this time because he was in an asylum and had no access to models and could not go outside. So he used the work of other artists as a starting point, valuing their genius but knowing that he was relying on their work as a crutch, or at least as a springboard. As he was making these works, he kept his spirits up by­ saying, “I make a point of telling myself, yes I am something, I can do something.” He was; he could.

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