CHAPTER 6
The Trouble with Too Much Grit
THE BOY'S MOTHER APPRECIATED music and art, but when the boy tried to freehand sketch the family cat, he proved such a deficient draftsman that he destroyed the picture and refused to try again. Instead, he spent his childhood in the Netherlands playing marbles or sledding with his little brother, but mostly just looking at things. A prominent parenting handbook advised against unsupervised wanderings that might "intoxicate" a child's imagination, but he wandered alone for hours. He walked in storms, and at night. He walked for miles just to sit for hours watching a bird's nest, or following water bugs on their commutes across a brook. He was especially obsessed with collecting beetles, labeling each one with its proper Latin species name.
When he was thirteen, the boy was admitted to a brand-new school housed in a hulking former royal palace. It was so far from his home that he had to board with a local family. His mind was elsewhere during class, but he was a good student, and spent his free time memorizing poetry.
The art teacher was the faculty celebrity, an education pioneer who argued for design to become a central part of the national economic engine. That crusade was so successful it led the federal government to mandate freehand drawing classes in every public school. Rather than holding forth from the front of the class, the teacher arranged students in the center and meandered through them like a sewing needle, giving personal attention. Most students adored him. But he made no impression on the boy. As an adult, the boy would complain that nobody had ever told him what perspective was in drawing, even though it was so central to the teacher's tenets that knowledge of perspective was written into the new law expanding art education.
The boy didn't like living with strangers, so he left the school just before he turned fifteen. For the next sixteen months, he did little other than take long nature walks. That could not go on forever, but he had no idea what else to do. Fortunately, his uncle owned a fantastically successful art dealership, and had just been knighted. He offered his nephew a job in the big city. Making art had not inspired the boy, but selling it did. He turned the observational intensity he had practiced in nature to lithographs and photographs, categorizing what he saw just as he had his beetles. By twenty, he was dealing with important clients and traveling abroad for sales trips. The young man confidently told his parents that he would never have to look for a job again. He was wrong.
He was a country boy in the city, without enough social grace to smooth over disagreements with his boss, and he disliked bargaining, which felt like trying to take advantage of customers. He was soon transferred to a London office that did not deal directly with customers, and then at twenty-two he was transferred again, this time to Paris. He arrived in France amid an artistic revolution. On walks to work, the young man passed the studios of artists who were in the process of becoming famous. And yet, as with the art teacher, as a pair of his future biographers would write, "None of it registered." He was too busy with a new obsession: religion. Years later, when he and his little brother discussed those revolutionary artists, he would say he had "seen absolutely nothing of them."
When he was finally dismissed from the dealership, he went to work as an assistant teacher at a boarding school in a seaside town in England. Working fourteen-hour days, he taught classes from French to math, oversaw the dorm, took the kids to church, and acted as the handyman. The school was simply a business venture for the owner, and the young man was cheap labor. He found another job as a tutor, this time at a fancier boarding school, but after a few months he decided he would become a missionary in South America. His parents talked him out of that, insisting that he needed to "stop following [his] own desires" and return to a stable life course. His mother wished he would do something in nature that would make him "happier and calmer." He decided to follow in his father's footsteps; he would train to become a full-fledged pastor.
In the meantime, his father arranged a job as a bookstore clerk. The young man loved books and worked from 8 a.m. until midnight. When the store flooded, he astounded his colleagues with his sheer physical endurance as he carried pile after pile of books to safety. His new goal was to get accepted to a university so that he could later train as a pastor. Again, he unleashed his tireless passion. He worked with a tutor, and copied by hand the text of entire books. "I must sit up as long as I can keep my eyes open," he told his brother. He reminded himself that "practice makes perfect," but Latin and Greek did not come easily to him. He moved in with an uncle, a stern war hero who urged him simply, "push on." The young man resolved to begin work before his peers rose and finish after they slept. His uncle would find him reading in the wee morning hours.
And still, he floundered in his studies. Nearing his twenty-fifth birthday, the young man heard a sermon about how the economic revolution had made certain citizens, like his art-dealer uncle, fabulously wealthy, while others had been thrust into abject poverty. He decided to forsake university to spread the Word more quickly. He opted for a shorter educational course, but was not adept at giving the succinct, punchy sermons that the school mandated. He failed in that program as well. But nobody could stop him from preaching, so he headed for coal country, where inspiration was needed most.
When the young man arrived and saw the blackened sky, he likened it to the shading of a Rembrandt. There he would preach to workers so downtrodden that they referred to the world above the mineshaft as "up in Hell." He dove in to spiritual service with his usual verve, giving away his clothes and money, and doting night and day on the ill and injured. They were legion.
Shortly after he arrived, a series of explosions killed 121 miners and sent gas streaming out of the ground, fueling a pillar of fire like some monstrous Bunsen burner nestled below the earth. The suffering locals marveled at the young man's endurance as he tried to soothe families. But they also found him odd; the children he taught did not listen. Soon, his makeshift ministry was finished. He was twenty-seven, and despondent. A decade after an exuberant start as an art dealer, he had no possessions, accomplishments, or direction.
He poured his heart out in a missive to his little brother, now a respected art dealer himself. He likened himself to a caged bird in spring who feels deeply that it is time for him to do something important but cannot recall what it is, and so "bangs his head against the bars of his cage. And then the cage stays there and the bird is mad with suffering." A man, too, he exhorted, "doesn't always know himself what he could do, but he feels by instinct, I'm good for something, even so! . . . I know that I could be a quite different man! . . . There's something within me, so what is it!" He had been a student, an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller, a prospective pastor, and an itinerant catechist. After promising starts, he had failed spectacularly in every path he tried.
His brothers suggested he try carpentry, or look for work as a barber. His sister thought he would make a fine baker. He was an insatiable reader, so perhaps a librarian. But in the depths of his despair, he turned his ferocious energy on the last thing he could think of that he could start right away. His next letter to his brother was very short: "I'm writing to you while drawing and I'm in a hurry to get back to it." Previously, the man had seen drawing as a distraction from his aim of reaching people with truth. Now he began to seek truth by documenting the lives around him in drawings. He had stopped drawing freehand as a child when he realized he was a clumsy draftsman, so he started at the very beginning, reading Guide to the ABCs of Drawing.
In the coming years, he would make a few very brief attempts at formal training. His cousin-in-law was a painter and tried to teach him watercolor. The cousin would later be listed on the man's Wikipedia page as the sole entry beside "Education." In truth, the man struggled with the fragile touch required for watercolor, and the mentor/mentee relationship ended after a month. His former art-dealer boss, now an esteemed tastemaker in the art world, pronounced his drawings unworthy of being displayed for sale. "Of one thing I am sure," the boss told him, "you are no artist." He added flatly, "You started too late."
When he was nearly thirty-three, he enrolled in art school alongside students a decade younger, but lasted only a few weeks. He entered the class drawing competition, and the judges harshly suggested he revert to a beginner's class with ten-year-olds.
As he had between careers, he pinballed from one artistic passion to another. On one day he felt true artists only painted realistic figures, and then when his figures came out poorly, the next day true artists only cared for landscapes. One day he strived for realism, another for pure expression. This week art was a medium for declaring religious devotion, next week such concerns encumbered pure creation. One year he decided all true art consisted only of shades of black and gray, and then later that vibrant color was the real pearl inside the artist's shell. Each time he fell fully in love, and then just as fully and quickly back out.
One day, he dragged an easel and oil paints—with which he had almost no experience—out to a sand dune in a storm. He ran in and out of cover, slapping and slathering paint on the canvas in staccato strokes between gusts of wind that peppered the painting with grains of sand. He squeezed color right from the tube onto the canvas when he had to. The viscous oil paint and the speed required to apply it in the storm freed his imagination and his hand from the crippling deficiencies that plagued him when he strove for perfect realism. More than a century later, his definitive biographers would write of that day, "[He] made an astonishing discovery: he could paint." And he felt it. "I enjoy it tremendously," he wrote his brother. "Painting has proved less difficult than I expected."
He continued to whipsaw from one artistic experiment to another, avowing and disavowing, roundly condemning the attempt to capture sunlight in paint only to reverse course and place his canvas outside in the sunlight to do just that. He obsessed over deeper and darker blacks in colorless works, and then dispensed with that in an instant and forever in favor of vibrant color, his about-face so thorough that he would not even use black to depict the night sky. He started piano lessons because he thought musical tones might teach him something about color tones.
His peregrinations continued for the few remaining years of his short life, both geographically and artistically. He finally forsook the goal of ever becoming a master draftsman, and then one by one left behind all of the styles that he had previously claimed to be critical, but at which he had failed. He emerged with a new art: impetuous, slathered with paint, erupting with color, laden with no formality other than to capture something infinite. He wanted to make art that anyone could understand, not haughty works for those with privileged training.