‘Komorebi’ - Van Gogh at the National Gallery (II)

January causes you to gravitate towards the merest hint of a blue sky. And when that blue is of the shade that appears in the top left-hand corner of Van Gogh’s The Garden at the Asylum at Saint-Rémy, you can’t help but dive straight in. Look, too, how it somehow trickles down onto the garden path, pooling around the stone bench placed right at the heart of the painting.

Van Gogh, The Garden at the Asylum at Saint-Rémy (1889)

Perhaps it’s that inviting bench - the loveliest bench in the history of art? - that provoked my only criticism of this exhibition. Of the seven rooms, only two places were set aside to sit, gaze and wonder. No matter, you still manage to insert yourself into the painting and then work out from the centre. The painting may be empty of all human life, but even that and the violence inherent in the title’s darker noun - and not forgetting all of its accompanying biographical circumstances - cannot come close to invading the sense of calm washing over you as you look on. In particular, I love the flurry of black ticks that create a sense of verdant depth and cool lushness in the grass surrounding the bench. 

And look at the the colours and the way that they somehow shimmer, allowing the blue to dapple downwards through the canopy of the tree. 

Van Gogh, detail from The Garden at the Asylum at Saint-Rémy

Sitting there - I’d secured myself a little National Gallery stool by this point - caused me to recall a film that I’d recently seen, Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days. The main character in that film, Hirayama, is a public toilet cleaner who not only takes a meticulous and joyous pride in his work, but also spends his lunchtimes in a shrine shooting analogue photographs that capture the way that light falls through the leaves on trees. 

Kōji Hashimoto as Hirayama in Wim Wenders' Perfect Days

At the film’s close we are informed that the Japanese have a particular term for this phenomenon of sunlight filtering between leaves creating a play of light and shadow: ‘komorebi’. Van Gogh captures this wonderfully. And as I sat there, I couldn’t help but place Hirayama on that stone bench and imagined how he would have revelled in Van Gogh’s kaleidoscope of blossom. A wonderful film and an absolute delight of a painting.