Museo de la Filatelia

I loved the Museo de la Filatelia, it's a beautiful museum of stamps, letters, and other things postal. Just as I wrote that sentence I heard that critical, nagging, voice within say "You sure do use the word 'love' a lot. It sounds too simple, there must be more to it. Do you really love so many things? You need to be more discerning, censorious, analytical, and professional."

I do? What is with that critical, nagging voice? Curious about how many times I've used the word "love" on my blog, I did a search and came up with 161 posts. I love that. And the way the things I love contradict and overlap.

I also loved the night, three years ago, when I was snowed in in Boulder, Colorado and the only place open was the Boulder Book Store. It was there that I discovered Brenda Euland's book, "If You Want To Write," and in it, this:

If you read the letters of the painter van Gogh you will see what his creative impulse was. It was just this: he loved something -the sky, say. He loved human beings. He wanted to show human beings how beautiful the sky was. So he painted it for them. And that's all there was to it.

When van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. He sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: "It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks." And then on his cheap ruled notepaper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it.

When I read this letter of van Gogh's it comforted me very much and seemed to throw clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I had thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about design and balance and getting interesting planes into your painting, and avoided, with the most stringent severity, showing the faintest academical tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on.

But the moment I read van Gogh's letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

The difference between van Gogh and you and me is, that while we may look at the sky and think it is beautiful, we don't go as far as to show someone else how it looks. One reason may be that we do not care enough about the sky or for other people. But most often I think it is because we have been discouraged into thinking what we feel about the sky is not important.