The Olive Trees

Vincent van Gogh, 1889 · Gallery 501 · Floor 5

Alright, so… look at that dark blue ridge, left of the middle. Two holes in it. Like somebody punched straight through the rock. Keep those in mind. So, Van Gogh’s living at the asylum in the south of France. When he’s well enough, he goes out to paint the olive trees. He’s had his eye on them for a while. Before he even gets there, he’s telling his brother they remind him of the old willows in Dutch fields. Too beautiful to dare paint. Then… he dares. And they turn out to be a real pain. The leaves keep changing color on him. Silver, sometimes blue, sometimes greenish. Really hard, he admits. But… he’s into it. Look how the curves in the ground run up through the trunks and into the leaves. That famous one, with all those swirls up in the night sky, is from around this time, too. Here, he’s got that same energy running through the dirt. He wants the silver to be his, the way yellow was with the sunflowers. Plus, he figures, hardly anybody paints olive trees. So, he just keeps going back. By the end of the year, he’s made about fifteen of these olive paintings. This is one of the first. Anyway, back to those holes. People have read his mental illness into them. Figured he must have invented something that strange. But that’s a real rock outside Saint-Rémy. Les Deux Trous. The Two Holes. You can walk up there and see them.

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