Van Gogh Home

The braided journey

I slip into the dark room of the Van Gogh experience as the faint music starts in a whisper and swells as my eyes adjust. I see the first stroke illuminate the walls and swoop across the screen to the floor, and suddenly, I stand in the painting. The colors spill yellow and blue as walls and a bed form. The image quivers on every wall and the colors swirl to the floor like leaves in the fall. 

Brown speckles surround me in the next scene as a crosshatch tangle of roots grows up the wall. I remain underground with the roots as crisp green swaths bloom into a sea of purple irises. They burst on top of each other like popping kernels, each one bigger than the last until all purple fades to black. 

The black blooms with yellow, and I stand in a field of sunflowers. I look at a church ripped from history, and the archways march toward me as the grandest notes of the Great Gates of Kyiv crescendo. Red, yellow, and blue clusters of color explode over the scene like fireworks, and the experience starts over.  

I emerge back into the world of beige and gray with the word, artist, floating to the surface of my mind. I see it written in blue marker on the pages of my first-grade memory book, nestled between handprints and school pictures— the answer to the age-old question. My seven-year-old self looked into the future and saw an artist.  

I tried to change the artist into a marine biologist the year we vacationed at the beach, and I dug for colonies of creatures in the sand. Then to a park ranger, when we camped where the tides went out so far my feet squelched on the seabed. But in each variation, the artist broke through, urging me to draw what lay under the waves or attempt to carve when the trees surrounded me— until I saw Little Women. Jo March in her nightcap, writing stories by candlelight. I transformed the artist into a writer.

I wrote when the night sky brought images of a creative angel poking holes in the sky to let heaven shine for stars, and I rhymed all of my feelings as a teenager with poetry. Still, the artist transformed my words into art in calligraphy to decorate my room. I added curtains painted with ivy with the sounds of my sewing machine, and the artist became a designer. 

The answer to the age-old question eluded me when I was in the future. I studied writing, but the designer nudged me to learn proper calligraphy, drawing, and sewing. The writer left college with a degree but grew so discouraged the only thing I did with it was pursue interior design. I worked at a fabric store where the customers painted pictures of their houses with tile and carpet swatches, and I searched for the perfect choice to complete their painting. 

The designer faded to black when the scene shifted to Mother with the cries of two babies and a mountain of diapers.  I caught glimpses of the designer when I transformed tangles of unused fabric into pillows for a nonprofit* that decorates and furnishes homes for those who recently had none. I dreamed of working there and patiently waited for toddlers to become preschoolers and waited more impatiently while the mother homeschooled for kindergarten during the pandemic.  

When home was no longer school, I started volunteering at the nonprofit. I transformed donated chipped and stained furniture with the smell of fresh paint and sent the pieces to new homes with new owners.  I followed this creativity wherever it led until it returned to Jo March with her candle and nightcap. Hesitantly, I started to splash words onto paper.  

In my first house as a true designer at the nonprofit, the canvas stretched out before me in the form of blank walls and echoing rooms. The loss of their baby, possessions, and home weighed on top of this family like heavy layers of paint. A house became any shelter available. A home was in everything they carried on their backs. When they acquired this house, their beds were blankets, dressers were bags piled in the corner, and the floor was their only furniture.

 We splash blue flecked with red and yellow as we roll the rug onto the floor. We add a gray couch surrounded by two yellow chairs as bright as sunshine. The side tables frame this picture as we dot the landscape with red and yellow pillows. Time ticks down, and we wield our hammers as brushes when we hang a painting of a city street as another wall blooms with flowers. 

In the kitchen springs a table and chairs with blue place settings.  The painting spreads down the hall to a room for guests. The iron bed scrolls to life in the corner. Under the flowered blanket peeks a hint of bright coral, a welcoming tray for tea on its corner. The scene changes in the next room to a bed of unicorns.  Above the bed crawls a string of pom-poms lined up like yellow and pink berries on a kabob. 

The final scene is quiet as we climb up the steps, the purple curtains whispering in the breeze of the windows. The empty shelves now brim with books, and the echoing wall holds a desk and a pink chair. Around the corner lies a soft white bed blanketed with purple pillows as more flowers bloom on the walls.

A home has blossomed from the roots of this house. The two-dimensional bed of blankets has grown into three dimensions as I stand in this painting- designer, mother, and the writer writing this painting down.

*Humble Design