How Art Sits with Us in Our Sorrows

Russ Ramsey

We’re seldom helped by reading a sentence in a book that explains it all, because we sit with the sorrow and the grief and the way art works in us is it also sits with us in the sorrow and in the grief. It brings beauty into these places of pain and unfolds over time like a flower. And I think that that’s that’s part of how art works.

Collin Hansen

I had high hopes last year walking my family through one of my favorite places on earth, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Now, in no way I qualify as an art expert, but I enjoy the challenge of learning, and I love being stretched to grow in front of world class experts in beauty. Unfortunately, I think I set my hopes quite a bit too high for three kids younger than 10, and the visit ended in my visible frustration as we headed to Times Square in the in the Hershey’s chocolate world, which was a much bigger, bigger hit. Well, maybe I’ll get to visit the met one day with my friend Russ Ramsey. Is the author of the new book Van Gogh has a broken heart when art teaches us about the wonder and struggle of being alive, published by our friends at Zondervan, reflective. I never get tired of Russ telling the stories behind great art and artists. In this book, he writes this art shows us back to ourselves, and the best art doesn’t flinch or look away. Rather, it acknowledges the complexity of struggles like poverty, weariness and grief, while defiantly holding forth beauty, reminding us that beauty is both scarce and everywhere we look. And he goes on to say, the truth is that we were made to exist in the presence of glory. Well, here we go. Let’s hear more from Russ on gospel bottom about the wonder and struggle of being alive. Welcome back, Russ.

Russ Ramsey

It is great to be back. Colin, thanks for having me. Well,

Collin Hansen

I really appreciated your earlier work. Rembrandt is in the wind now with Van Gogh has a broken heart. Should readers expect more of the same? What were they getting themselves into? I think

Russ Ramsey

they should expect more of the same, except for that, there’s a bit of more of a focus with this one on the subject, particularly of suffering and hope. So it is like Rembrandt is in the wind. It’s another 10 stories. So each chapter is kind of a standalone focused on a particular artist or work of art, but the theme that runs through these is a little bit little bit more focused than the Rembrandt, which was just kind of an introduction to a whole lot of art. And this is, this is more on the well, the wonder and struggle of of being alive, particularly through the the the works of art that we cover, and the and the lives of the artists discussed. Did

Collin Hansen

you have this book already in mind when you published the earlier one. Or how did this one develop? Yeah,

Russ Ramsey

you know, I had in mind additional chapters that I wanted to write. I didn’t have all 10 of them. I had maybe five of them. So in a way, I was kind of on the fence about whether to do a second one or not. But some of the stories were just so so compelling to me. And then as I started to see this theme of brokenness and suffering and pain kind of emerging in the stories, I really that really turned me on to finishing and gathering more stories and seeing more of what was out there for it.

Collin Hansen

One thing Russ I did not expect in this book was the story of how RC Sproul helped you love art and also prepared you to become a pastor. Did you share that with us?

Russ Ramsey

Yeah. So a number of years ago, when I was fresh out of college, I worked for a nonprofit here in Nashville called The Art House, which was founded by Charlie peacock. And think of it as kind of a Labrie type of ministry for the artistic community, specifically musicians in Nashville. How do you help a Christian musician? Think Christianly about all of life. And Ligonier Ministries was the art house in Ligonier did some event together, Charlie got to know RC or Dr Sproul. And so Ligonier ended up donating to the art house their entire cassette library, you know. So we had copies of everything on those little clamshell cassette things in my job. So right out of college, I got hired to work at the art house with Charlie, and one of my jobs was to basically create the Art House Library at the time, which involved cataloging all those cassettes. And I thought, well, I’m going to listen to these because I don’t, or at least to a lot of them, to get a sense of what it is that I’m actually cataloging. And that became, really the beginning of my journey into understanding that I was reformed in my thinking, which I didn’t really. Realize I didn’t have a word for that at the time and and so I must have listened to maybe 150 RC Sproul lectures at the time, and in one of them, one of the most memorable things I remember is him doing an at length description of Rembrandt’s Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem. And I think that a reproduction of that painting was the first reproduction of a classic work that we ever had in our home on the wall, and so that painting is has been around with me for a long, long time, and also through very formative seasons of my life. God bless. Dr Sproul,

Collin Hansen

how did that then translate into pastoral ministry.

Russ Ramsey

Well, during that time, I was trying to figure out what my calling was. I was a musician, and was really kind of wrestling with what should I be doing with my life? And while working at the art house, I really started to sense a call to not be a musician, but but to be a pastor of a local church. And through, through Scotty Smith, I was part of Christ community at the time, which where Charlie was at at the time as well, and kind of anybody you know from those days, and and so, yeah, Scotty was was really instrumental in helping me, because I, again, I came from a small town in Indiana. I was raised Catholic by first generation Christians. So there was no cultural Catholicism. There were just small town people hearing the gospel and plugging into a church that happened to be Catholic. My high school years, I was in a non denominational, charismatic world, and so so getting out of college, in my mind, I had become this kind of Reformed thinker just by what I’d read and my time in scripture. But I didn’t have language for it. I didn’t know what I’d never been because I’d never really been a part of a Protestant church proper at all. And so, yeah, so, so Sproul was, was kind of a gateway into all things reformed Presbyterian, in my case, and thinking theologically about creativity and beauty, which, which? Dr Sproul had a lot of wonderful things to kind of say about that, you know, and are the denomination I’m a part of the the PCA can can be a very heady and ethereal group and and I was always drawn to people like Like Dr Sproul, who kept art and beauty in the conversation, just as truth and goodness and theological precision were also so deeply prized, so that he was that was kind of the world that I came into as a way of entering into the pastoral call.

Collin Hansen

Let’s head back to Van Gogh, not a big segue in pastoral ministry, as you point out in the book, but you loved Van Gogh’s work before you understood it. Yeah, let’s understand how you came to understand Van Gogh.

Russ Ramsey

You know, I think one of the great things about Van Gogh is that he is pretty ubiquitous, like people. Most people have seen Van Gogh’s work, and can identify at least several of his paintings as being Van Gogh. And there’s this kind of a signature style, and when you see it originally, or at least for me when I first was when I was young in high school and was looking at Van Gogh paintings, I liked what he was doing with the brush work, and I thought they looked cool, but there was a quality to them that drew me in, and I couldn’t have put words to it then. But recently, I was teaching a class of second graders. There’s a school here that invited me to do a class, just teach one class on on Van Gogh. And so I brought the sunflower paintings, and really kind of focused on those, and I told them a little bit of his life story, but when I showed them the paintings, I said, kids, these are second graders. I said, I want you to sit with these paintings, look at them, and we’re going to spend 20 minutes not saying anything. I just want you to look at this pot of sunflowers, and then I’m going to ask you some questions about it. And so we sat there in this you know, what felt like an eternity for second graders. And at the end, I said, Okay, so tell me some of the things that you felt looking at this painting. And I was running a little personal experiment, and my experiment worked, because about five or six kids into that one kid sheepishly raised his hand and said, I felt sad. And I was like, there it is. Van Gogh was a man whose life was filled with with pain and longing and and a search for something sacred. And it is in all of his work, in in these intangible ways, in the same way that that an author’s passion and despair and hurts and pains. Would be kind of woven into the the way that they structure sentences, and the verbs they use and don’t use. And you know, like there’s this, whether you say it explicitly, there’s an undercurrent of tone in how you communicate. And one of the things with with Van Gogh’s work, that I was kind of drawn to was this longing in it for completion, this longing for being in the presence of the Divine, and this, this wrecking reckoning with internal sorrow and despair. And it was so interesting to hear second graders recognize sorrow in a painting of sunflowers. You know, when I asked, Did anybody else feel that? You know, there were a couple other hands. It wasn’t the entire classroom, but there were a couple there were a couple other hands, astute young second graders who raised their hands and said, Yeah, I kind of felt that too, but it’s, it’s one of the great things about Van Gogh, is his life is so full of so much suffering and glory, and then it’s all like recorded, because he’s written all these Letters that remain and that you can go to the website, Van Gogh, letters.org, and you can read them all and see photos of them. And so we have his life, maybe is the life of an artist that we have the most complete written record of in the artist’s own words, with a body of work that size and that and that nationally or globally recognized. So he’s a he’s a really deep well of of thinking about all things, from faith to sorrow to struggle to sin to hope and beauty and wonder and all that. And so he’s, he’s, I’ve been following, tracking along with him ever since, and I feel like I’m just getting started.

Collin Hansen

So interesting that we have all that knowledge and access to his thought process all out of proportion to his success as an artist while he was

Russ Ramsey

living. Yeah, he sold one painting while he was alive, and that to the sister of a friend who bought it at an art exhibition. And so it he did not experience any commercial success during his lifetime, although toward the end of his life, right before he died, he he was becoming respected in the art world in a way where people were beginning to seek him out and regard him and write about him in ways that were very honoring to his craft, and he was, he was one of those personalities. I’m sure everybody knows somebody like this, who the personality of of please love me and also go away like that was kind of his, his his way with attention when it came to his art, that he knew he was a good painter, and he knew he was doing something that was unique and expressive and real. But then when people would start to say, you’re doing something unique, expressive and real, he would say, Please don’t talk about me. And so yeah, but yeah that he he did not, he did not know what it was like to be Van Gogh as the world knows him, right?

Collin Hansen

Well, just like you experienced the second graders experienced in those painfully long 20 minutes, that is that experience, 20 seconds. It was just 20 seconds, seconds, okay, yeah, minutes would have been extraordinary. Oh, yeah, just 20 seconds. Okay, wow. They really were astute. That’s very impressive. Well, how does how does that experience of viewing art and even just 20 seconds or hearing sad stories? How does that then comfort us in our pain? And those second graders were old enough to have experienced real, real pain. I

Russ Ramsey

think one of the ways I love this question. Is I think that I think of Jesus parables, and I think of the stories that he chose to tell, a lot of the parables that Jesus tell have pain in them. They have they have broken relationships. They have declined invitations to celebrations. They have, you know, inability to pay for what you need. They have, you know, all kinds of things. And I think for a lot of the for a lot of the things that we carry and we struggle with, the sorrows, the griefs that we carry, we were seldom helped by reading a sentence in a book that explains it all, because we sit with the sorrow and the grief, and the way art works in us is it also sits with us in the sorrow and in the grief. It brings beauty into these places of pain and unfolds over time like a flower. And I think that that’s that’s part of how art works, whether whether we’re taking in visual art or music or whatever, when we internalize these expressions of beauty, their meaning and their significance and their beauty and their and their acknowledgement of the brokenness and the pain that we feel. People also sits with us and is in no hurry to go anywhere, and it’s also in no hurry to fix us. And I think that that’s where we find a tremendous amount of comfort, because a lot of the things that that we deal with, because of the world being as broken as it is, are things that stay with us for a really long time, and art becomes a not as much of an answer as a companion.

Collin Hansen

Let’s stick on the theme of sadness. And you write that much of the world’s great art comes from places of sadness, and I believe that’s often why we connect with it. Russ, does that mean that we we don’t connect with happiness, or we connect more with sadness. How does that work? I

Russ Ramsey

think, you know, I think it was Martin Luther King, Jr, who said, only when it’s dark enough can you then see the stars. You know, I think that that part of, part of experiencing true joy is allowing for true lament. I think that lament is a way of it’s an it’s an expression of rejoicing. And that may sound counterintuitive, but lament is the acknowledgement that things are not as they were meant to be, and it is the hope for the Lord to restore everything to as it was meant to be. And so, so when we, when we enter into, you know, looking at the things that break our hearts and make us sad, and we do so intentionally, one of the things that we’re doing is we’re stoking the fire of hope, and we’re stoking the fire of longing for all things to be made new by, by not pretending that the world isn’t broken, but actually by by, by acknowledging it, looking it in the eye and actually pulling it apart a little bit to understand how how broken it is and how deeply it affects us. And so these, these, you know, that’s, that’s the thing about art that’s kind of born out of sorrow, is it still remains beautiful. You know, it’s, it’s kind of both things together. And I think that that’s a, that’s a sign of of spiritual maturity, is to be able to feel multiple emotions at the same time, and even and especially conflicting emotions at the same time, because that’s a recognition that that the sad part won’t have the final say, that this whole thing doesn’t in despair. But there’s this, there’s this unflagging glory that is kind of this, this way that human beings express what John wrote about Christ, and that the Light has come into the world and the darkness has not overcome it. That’s what beauty reminds us of.

Collin Hansen

I think a good connection here might be how you write about how art invites us to experience the sublime. Talk about that dynamic. Yeah,

Russ Ramsey

yeah. So this was a there’s a chapter in the book about the Hudson River School painters who were this group of painters who didn’t all know each other, but they are put into this category because of the work that they did, and the work that they did was they, they were Hudson River area east coast artists, slash explorers, expeditionists who went out on these parties that were going into the interior of the US before it was, before it was, you know, built up, before it was settled by by European People and immigrants coming in. It was they would go and they would paint this untamed land, and they would bring and they would do it on these large scale paintings. There’s a beautiful one in the and a giant one in the art museum in downtown Alabama, or, I mean, downtown, sorry, Birmingham and and they would bring these back, and they would display them to where it almost felt like you were stepping into the scene. They were so big, and they were simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. They were breathtaking, and they were also places that you looked at. And you would think, if I was there, I would probably die, you know, just this untamed, vast wilderness, Yosemite, you know, the Rocky Mountains, all these things and and I was thinking about that, how, you know, there’s the there’s this difference between things being beautiful and things being sublime. And that difference is that beauty is something that we we look at and we were drawn to it’s attractive to us. We’re drawn to it, and we instinctively really want to possess it in some way. The Sublime and beauty would be a subset of the sublime. The Sublime would be things that we look at, and we would say, this is the. Beautiful, but it’s also terrifying, and it’s magnificent, and it’s also something that dwarfs me, and it’s something that I want to be in the midst of, but I could never get my arms around even the word sublime, that literally means under the lentil, which means it’s as high as you can go before you break through into something that you can’t survive. And I think of Moses asking the Lord to if Can I see you? And the Lord’s answer is, I’m sublime. So or I’m I’m beyond the sublime. You can’t you would, you would not be able to survive seeing my glory and and so that’s a fascinating that was a fascinating chapter to unpack, because I think that for believers, there’s that part of us, Lewis talks about the the news from a country that we’ve yet, not yet visited, that feels like home, that there’s this longing in us to be in the presence, in the midst, right in the midst, of glorious, glorious things that are, that are too in the in the old, in the old hymnal, use of the word too terrible for us to to be able to withstand such as we are. And yet the hope is that we know we were made for a glory that’s even greater than that, forever. And so, so that, that idea of of the sublime. Being this, this, for those painters, being these images of things that are so compelling and inviting and also so wild and untamed and and beyond the civilizations that they’ve known is struck me as just a really poignant kind of way that Christians move through the world, or at least ought to, I think,

Collin Hansen

well, when you’re talking about visual arts, it’s almost always associated with high culture. I know that’s not your background. I mean, you were, you did learn about these things growing up, but probably not necessarily, a ton of high culture within your community there wasn’t in mine growing up much, Nashville is a different story. Birmingham, to a certain extent, where I am is a different story as well. And I’m just wondering, how does how does this interest in the visual arts? How does that translate into your pastoral ministry? Does it strike people as as being kind of inaccessible because it’s part of that high culture, or are they able to really grasp onto the significance of it?

Russ Ramsey

Yeah, I love that. I love that question. Colin for me, one of the passions for me, because I grew up in rural Indiana around farmers, and one of my muses in writing these books about art as those farmers is, I think I want to write stories about art that I could hand to one of the farmers that I grew up down the street from, who would read it, and their response would be, that’s a really good story, because, because farmers where I come from are people very acquainted with beauty and Nature, they’re no nonsense. They understand the harmony of man and land, and they, they don’t suffer fools, and they’re and so there, it’s not that, you know, it’s not, oh, the the uneducated farmers. No, no. It’s the it’s the I want. Because we’re people of stories. All of us are. And so my whole approach to talking about art is just to tell you stories. So I am, I am. I spend 5% of the time trying to be academic and breaking down art theory and art, you know, history and critics, and I’ll just, I’m, I’m putting together for the reader a tale. It’s true, but I think that that an art is the the medium through which or the subject matter through which I do that, but art about story is a Trojan horse for truth. It’s why Jesus spoke in parables all the time. It’s because you can slip so much past the gates of people’s defenses. If you just tell them a story, you could say, Hey, you’re being a terrible parent right now because of the way you’re treating your child, and you need to fix that. Or you can be like Jesus and say, there was a father who had two sons, and then you’re in, you’re like, What happened to the sons? And you and you listen to the sons, and you hear about the Father, and you know, and art is, is that, and then what I do with the art that I’m engaging with is a layer of story on top of that. And so for me, I think part of what I’m intentionally up to as I’m writing about art is really trying to kind of subversively undermine the idea that art is high culture, because we can make it high culture, but it’s not intended to be high culture. It’s intended to be a way that we, who are gatherers of stories, gather up and preserve those stories, and that’s what I’m trying to help people do. My favorite response when people read one of these books is when somebody says it made me want to go to an art museum. Yeah. I’m like, Yes, that’s, that’s the hope is that you would go into an art museum without feeling like there’s some sort of like. Uh, schooling that you should have taken before walking into the building, you can just walk around and see if you like anything. And that’s enough.

Collin Hansen

Makes me I wasn’t there that long ago, but makes me want to go back to the Birmingham Museum of Art and go just sit and stare in front of looking down Yosemite Valley, California, Albert Bierstadt, that’s what you were referring to earlier, that landscape painting a beautiful one. Now, one thing I didn’t expect we’re talking here with Russ Ramsey about his new book, Van Gogh has a broken heart, what art teaches us about the wonder and struggle of being alive, published by his honor and reflective. Didn’t expect in this book to open it up and find Norman Rockwell, and I think especially as a as a father, perhaps I was quite moved by your story about his 1954 painting. Breaking home ties was really significant. So of course, I have that same farm background that you do there. So another reason that was significant to me, I knew, of course, about his 1963 painting, the problem we all live with. Speaking of a significant year in Birmingham history, this is not about Birmingham, but about a similar situation. Tell us more about this artist, Norman Rockwell, who’s widely associated today and then in certain ways, with the conservative tradition, but how he ended up painting Ruby Bridges? Yeah,

Russ Ramsey

so the I really this is, if there’s one chapter that I would ask people to, you know, read, it would be the Norman Rockwell chapter. I love all of them, but this one for me, because I started writing the Norman Rockwell chapter thinking it was going somewhere else, and Nashville, the city where I live, we have this art museum that has no permanent collection. It just has traveling exhibits, and a Norman Rockwell collection came through a number of years ago, and it takes you and probably 200 paintings from Norman Rockwell of a Saturday Evening Post covers and beyond were there, and it was amazing. It was amazing. But my whole life growing up, I thought Norman Rockwell was a coffee table book. He was, he was the sentimental winking at the view, at the viewer. You know, Saturday Evening Post magazine cover, tongue in cheek. You know, sentimental American, white, largely white American and, and. But what he understood about his job was that his job was to tell America’s story back to her as it was happening. And so when he started painting, he he painted a lot about US presidents in World War Two and the the, you know the the phenomenon of of young men going off to war and coming home and girlfriends and baseball and you know Thanksgiving dinners. And you know freedoms. You know constitutional freedoms, and all this and and when he got into, as he was getting into the 50s and 60s, he started to become aware in ways that he hadn’t either admitted or just been. Been in the presence of a lot of the the inequality that was happening in our country, civil rights cases and issues, and he was reading about them, and to his great credit, he did not push those things aside, but he instead owned his sense of calling, which was to tell America’s story back to her as it was happening. And part of what was happening is he was having a kind of a personal awakening to what is my role as America’s storyteller when it comes to the issues of civil rights and so Ruby Bridges, when, when this young African American kindergarten girl had to be escorted to a desegregated elementary school by US Marshals while being yelled at by grown ups and having tomatoes thrown at her. Rockwell read about that, and he painted it in this painting called the problem we all live with, which is that famous scene of her walking with the US Marshals in front and back. He painted another painting called Do unto others, which is so in all of his earlier work, his editors at the Saturday Evening Post, basically the unwritten rule was, if you’re going to include people of color in your works, put them in servile positions. And so you can have a black man, but he needs to be a waiter, or somebody helping you with your luggage onto a train, or something like that. Well, Rockwell complied with that. When you look at some of his earlier work, when you see people of color, they’re in servile positions. But then, when he painted this Do unto others, it was this break that he had where he kind of drew a line and. And it’s all nationalities represented, all religions represented, and they’re all standing kind of in a in a group image, facing the viewer, so they’re they’re not interacting with each other, they’re just looking at us. And down in the bottom left corner is a little African American kindergarten girl holding school books, and it is just piercing through your soul, because it’s Ruby Bridges. He she is in the painting. And so as this was going on, and he was starting to begin to tell this story, there was this lynching that happened in Mississippi that involved the murder of an African American man and two Jewish men from New York City who were in Mississippi helping black people register to vote, and and they were basically pulled over for traffic stop, and one thing led to another, and they were taken out into the country and beaten to death and buried and and Rockwell painted that scene. He painted the scene right before those three men were dead as they’re getting ready to die. And it was shocking, because this was not the Norman Rockwell people knew, but it was this riveting. And the final version of the painting, you don’t even see the Klansmen and the police officers who are about to beat them to death. You just see their shadows with their clubs and their rifles and their hats and and it was a break for him from the Saturday Evening Post. He ended up publishing that with a different magazine. But all of that story, the thing that compels me so much about it, aside from just the importance of telling that story, was when I think from an individual perspective, I think Rockwell had some choices to he could have easily just not done that. His, his, his money was fine. You know, his, his his recognition was fine, and he put all of that kind of up on the block to continue to do what he committed to doing when he was younger, and that was continue to tell our story back to us in a way that helps us better understand ourselves. So that chapter snuck up on me, and I really was thrilled with how, how it how it weaved around and got to where it did.

Collin Hansen

Yeah, I teach about the Ruby Bridges story, because these young, young African Americans, they’re just not that old today. I mean, she’s 70 years old today, so it’s not a distant part, part of our history there with her experience there in New Orleans, and I think Russ, one thing that stands out about your book is it feels as though it’s an This provides an easy way to talk about a shared experience and language with our non Christian friends and neighbors and and family, because these these artifacts, these pieces of art, are universal for our culture and for all these different times and our in in United States, but then more broadly across the West, but then also, it’s the story of suffering that you draw out. And that’s why you said it’s a book about art, but it’s a book about suffering. You have a quote in here that says, seeing through our suffering won’t show us a new world, but it will show us more of the world we think we already know. And affliction is bound to find us when it does whatever faith we profess, along with all its convictions regarding the meaning of this life and the next, will be tested. And so I see the book as an opportunity to really engage people in those conversations. So if people are looking for a way to talk with their neighbors about some significant ideas and provoke deeper discussion, this book is a great way to do that. Now I mentioned rest at the beginning of this interview that I had taken my family to the Met last fall. I did not mention that our trip to MOMA to the Museum of Modern Art, was way worse than that one. I utterly failed to convey the wonder and significance of this place. I need your advice. What should I have done differently? Russ, well,

Russ Ramsey

I think one of the things I encourage people to do is have a plan going in. So I’m a little bit of a I contradict myself on this, so I’m going to just admit it, but I’m a person who when I go into an art museum, I love to go in, not knowing what’s there. But if you’re new at going to art museums, it might be a good idea to kind of look ahead online to figure out what are the things I must see? Yeah, you’ll

Collin Hansen

miss stuff. You just don’t know how it’s laid out. You don’t know which corner to turn if you’re not oriented toward it. You really don’t even know how to walk. Yeah,

Russ Ramsey

and when you go into any museum that has the word modern in its name, just just pace yourself and don’t feel like you need to go. It at all because, because I don’t get it, like it’s, you know, at some point you’re gonna see some, probably tower of clock radios, all playing different radio stations,

Collin Hansen

shovel. I think, I think my older son, it was the shovel that got in,

Russ Ramsey

right? Yeah, you know, I think, I think having a plan for because, because here’s the here’s the truth. Let me set you free. You cannot take in a museum in one visit. You can’t. You just can’t. You can. You can see everything in a muse in most museums in one visit. But you can’t take in everything because it just becomes white noise, and you will find yourself breezing past a Picasso because, for the love of everything decent and holy, have already seen enough paintings today, right? And so, so figure out what you want to go see. So if you’re going to MOMA, if you’re if you want to go back, here’s what I would do. I would go find Starry Night, which is there, I would go find Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, and I was just not

Collin Hansen

on display when we were there. Oh, really, hopefully it’ll be back soon. See, that’s

Russ Ramsey

just sneaky. And then, and then I would go find Edward Hopper, and that’s where I would start. And, and then, you know, you’ll catch things out of the corner your eyes. Some water lilies there too. Yeah, yeah. You’ll see those. You’ll see those Yeah. But I think, you know, let yourself off the hook. Think of yourself when you go to a museum, if you’re listening to this, if you go to a museum, think of yourself as there to see some of the things in the museum. And know that the museum is brick and mortar and it’ll be there for you. You can go back later and see other things. But you know, the the, the, yeah, have a little sense of, maybe, what are one or two things that I want to see, because in the process of getting to them, you’ll see a lot of other things you want to double back and look at, and you’ll, you’ll get a chance to kind of, kind of do that, but relieve yourself of the feeling of needing to take it all in in a day. It’s as silly as wanting to take Paris in a day, you know, you just can’t. You just can’t true? Yeah, that’s

Collin Hansen

true with Christina’s World being gone, it sent me down a whole rabbit hole of investigating the history of the painting and its controversy. It’s not exactly the painting them that MoMA is most proud of, and yet it’s one of the paintings they’re most closely associated with so and I remember when I when I first visited mom, I think this was my second visit, not sure if there was another one in there, but I remember just walking through a random hallway. At some level, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, other than Starry Night and Simone. And I just saw that painting. I was like, Wait a minute. I I definitely recognize that, but I was so shocked to see it in a hallway, yeah, yeah, with any sort of major display or anything like that. So I went looking for it until I finally realized it had been taken down for whatever reasons. But I think hopefully is back up by now, or will be soon. Well, Russ, I want to close on on this question. It’s a beautiful line. I mean, it’s such a beautifully written book that honors the beautiful visual paintings that you discuss in the book, but you write that artists read our story back to us, and we, in turn, ask to see the pictures. Tell us more what you

Russ Ramsey

think about that. Well, I think that you know, art is good. Paintings are visual storytelling. They are not. They’re not just a still image of one thing. They are a composition that leads your eye through it in a particular way. And so when you stand in front of, let’s just use one that a lot of people know, Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son, which is, you know, the son on his knees and the embrace of his father and the older brother is standing to one side, and then there’s a smattering of people in the background. When you look at that painting, you look at six paintings, whether you know it or not, you are because the way that the Lord made our physiology, and the way he made us just our minds to work, is we. We don’t look at the whole painting one at once. We look at parts of it, and we travel around. And a good painter will compose in a way where they will lead you through their composition in the order they want you to see it. And so when you walk up to Rembrandt’s return of the prodigal son. What you see is a kneeling, almost bald man in the embrace of his father in a regal robe. That’s what you look at first. I defy you to see anything else first, because it’s what’s in the light. It’s prominent, it’s and then from there, your eye is trained to go up to the right, because the next brightest object and most prominent and tallest object is the disapproving older brother. And so now you’ve seen two pictures, and what do you have? You have a drama. You have one being embraced, and another standing at a distance, and then behind him, you’ve got a series of characters in varying degrees of nearness. And light and engagement with the scene. And you you get these very distinct people reacting in very distinct ways, one after another after another, and it’s Rembrandt’s way of inviting you into that entire moment where the prodigal comes home. The father runs out to meet him. He wraps him up as an in his embrace. The older brother is out there, and he’s disapprovingly looking on. It’s all there. There’s a party going. It’s all captured in that one still image. And so these images are not just like just kind of frivolous supplements to the story, but they are other ways of telling the story, and and so and in the things that the artists choose to focus on and choose to leave out is is a way of storytelling. It’s a way of saying, Let me emphasize for you this so that now when we read the prodigal son story, and we’ve seen that Rembrandt painting, that moment of embrace between the Father and the Son. Has a has a has an image for us in our minds, which sometimes is helpful. Sometimes it’s not right. Sometimes we don’t. I don’t want to know what you know. I don’t you know. I don’t want this beloved character to turn out to look like Woody Harrelson, you know, or whatever. But, you know, like as an example, but, but that’s, that’s the thing is, where the Lord made us this way. He made us to be people who take in story through our ears but also through our minds or through our eyes.

Collin Hansen

Wonderful place for us to conclude. My guess has been Russ Ramsey, the book is Van Gogh has a broken heart. What art teaches us about the wonder and struggle of being alive is published by Zondervan reflective Russ. Thanks for the book and for joining me today.

Russ Ramsey

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Colin, I’ll see you soon.