Just Slap Something On It
The sketch in this letter is an idea for what would eventually become The Potato Eaters. Theo, one of Vincent’s younger brothers and his best friend, kept every letter Vincent ever sent him, hence the glut of letters that survive today.
When I was about 10, there was a poster of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers stuck to the classroom wall. We were told he was a madman who sliced his own ear off and occasionally made paintings in fields.
Eighteen years later, I was stood in the final room at the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, realising that I had been taught a bad piece of art history. He didn’t strike me as mad at all.
The man worked to get to those sunflowers. In the ten years he painted, he created over 2100 works. Gathered together in a museum, it means floor after floor of art, each level charting the progression of his early, tentative pencil sketches at 27 to the masterpieces made at 37, the final year of his life, by which point his health issues had kicked in hard, and he was painting largely to keep his head above water.
I read van Gogh’s collected letters last year, and in one of them, a piece of advice he gave his younger brother Theo stayed with me. It was about making things happen.
Just slap something on it, when you see a blank canvas staring at you […] You don’t know how paralysing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter ‘you can’t do anything’.
It got me thinking. I can’t be the only person who stares, glazed-eyed, at a blank Word document, willing myself to just get started already. Or who freezes in the face of going after a much-longed-for goal.
I think most of us have a few big, hoped-for things in life, dream projects or plans. The I-can’t-do-that paralysis, which means most plans are left unstarted or unfinished, often seems to stem from a few things:
Overwhelm. Achieving goals typically takes time and effort. Switching career, for instance, can take years. Saving for a house deposit? Forever (at least it’s feeling that way for me). Writing a book? Unless you have the luxury of being able to do it full-time, factor in months or years, not weeks. An academic qualification? Better be prepared to put in the hours and the effort. Learning a new language? I haven’t met anyone who mastered French in a few days.
The desire for a perfect result. No-one likes being the beginner. Starting from scratch invariably means being awkward, inelegant and making mistakes, which means what you’re doing isn’t perfect, which means ARGHHHH PEOPLE MIGHT NOT IMMEDIATELY UNDERSTAND, LIKE AND ADMIRE WHAT I’M DOING, which is essentially…
Fear of looking like an idiot. Doing anything new is sticking your head above the parapet and taking a risk. Especially for personal projects, it often means going in a direction your friends, family or colleagues aren’t, which might make them curious, which means they might notice when you inevitably have some failures, cue feeling humiliated…
…all of which leads to that feeling of paralysis van Gogh was talking about.
And yet all of these things can be done. Blank canvases become paintings, brushstroke by brushstroke. Languages are learnt one word or grammar rule at a time. Houses become homes slowly, each new little vase, or book or rug adding to it. Starting is the hardest part. Once you’ve done that, you have, as Vincent puts it later in the letter, “broken the spell of ‘you can’t’.”
van Gogh was 31 when he gave that piece of advice to his brother. It wasn’t coming from a place of smugness or superiority – at that point he had only been commissioned for paid painting work once, by his uncle, and was basically spamming the rest of his family with his unsold work. Theo and his wife had so many of Vincent’s paintings, they had to stack them under their bed.
At that point, he was not a successful or a recognised artist. So if he had stood in front of his blank canvas and told himself, “Right, this has to be a masterpiece, which establishes a new art movement and breaks auction house records in 100 years’ time,” he would have most likely run away screaming. Instead, he got on with the first step, and just dabbed a bit of paint on it.
It’s a mind trick, but it works. If, at the outset, you consider all the work it takes to achieve just one significant goal in life, it is very, very tempting to just give in and not get started. It’s too much. So many hours. So much effort. Such high risk of failure.
How to (eventually) achieve something big? By doing something small and scrappy and new. Whatever your personal blank canvas is, to get going, just slap something, anything, on it. Worry later.
Irises, 1890. I saw this in person once at the Met in NYC and it is beautiful – but it’s fading, and quickly. The irises were once purple and are fading to blue, and the white background was originally pink.