We’re going to be out of town this year for Thanksgiving, so on Sunday my husband and I hosted an early Thanksgiving for our families. We were excited to have everyone over – it’s our first year in our first house – and we were more than a little relieved that even if it did go badly, we at least wouldn’t ruin the “real” holiday – everyone else will still have dinner while we’re on vacation. We researched recipes and planned what dish would go in what serving bowl; we experimented with different table layouts and debated the various merits of different turkey cooking methods.

My husband was more nervous than I was – he’s the cook in the family. And while everyone enjoyed themselves, of course it wasn’t flawless. My husband was more than a little embarrassed when he delivered the turkey to the table with a flourish, cut into it, and promptly discovered the plastic bag that once held the innards. When it came time for dessert, the peanut butter cream pie I had baked wound up tasting pretty good but had the very unfortunate texture of Jell-o ® .

This evening, I read a review in the Wall Street Journal of a new collection of Van Gogh’s letters that suggests that the painter wasn’t quite the mad genius legend purports him to be. His genius is of course not up for dispute – it’s the mad part that’s up for debate. Yes, the collection argues, he was mentally ill (he was by his contemporaries dubbed “epileptic,” which at the time was a term used to identify a variety of mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder), but his illness wasn’t necessarily tied to the innovation he demonstrated in his work. In fact, the piece says, he didn’t paint or even write during his particularly bad episodes. When his illness was the worst, his creativity disappeared.

That idea surprised me – that Van Gogh’s thickly painted images of flowers and the French countryside might not have been painted in fits of mad passion completely contradicted every idea I had about the artist. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was a little disappointed...but why? Why would the suggestion that he wasn’t gesticulating furiously as he painted, driven only by his obsession to create, disappoint me?

This week I received an email from an old roommate to inform me that an art history professor of ours from the semester we spent in Italy had unexpectedly died over the weekend. The news surprised me; I hadn’t really known him very well, even when I was a student of his, but he was easily one of the best teachers I ever had. The enthusiasm and knowledge he demonstrated in on-site lectures were unmatched, and at every site we visited, small groups of tourists would inevitably start listening in and following us at a distance, until he laughingly told them there was no need to be shy; they were welcome to join us. More than once, the ends of his lectures were met with rounds of applause from people none of us knew at all.

One thing he made his students understand is that art is about connections between people. Just as his love of art united those unknown tourists – Australian and Japanese vacationers wandering through the Roman Forum or Vatican City – to us – American students sipping espresso and imagining ourselves very cosmopolitan – he showed us that art could connect us to people across time and space. As we stood in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi staring in awe at Caravaggio’s energetic paintings of the life of St. Matthew, he made us understand what those first viewers must have felt as they gasped in fascinated awe and shock at the unconventional and humane representations of such an auspicious saint. When we studied the cold, fascist sculptures in Mussolini’s EUR section of the city, we shared the chilled, stark apprehension that people felt decades ago.

Ever see a painting of a bowl of fruit and wonder, “What the heck would make somebody paint a bowl of fruit…and why should I want to look at it?” To be honest, I used to be one of those people – and I still can be sometimes. Still lifes (yep, in this context it’s “lifes,” not “lives”) often take me more energy and concentration to enjoy than a landscape or portrait does, but usually, the extra focus is worth the additional work.

Still life paintings, which are essentially just paintings featuring inanimate objects positioned by the artist in a plain or nondescript background, have a long history in European painting and have even been found in ancient tombs. Since those earliest known interpretations of the genre, the point has tended to be the same – take ordinary objects and position them in a way that they leave the viewer with a symbolic moral.

Today, you and I might look at that painting of a vase of flowers and think, “Sure, it’s pretty, but it doesn’t mean anything to me.” A lot of the reason that you and I don’t see the symbols is that we don’t live in the same cultural context in which the painting was created. To the people who lived in the time in which the canvas was painted, the symbols would be clear. Sure, to us, a watch might not symbolize temperance like it did for the 17th century Dutch, but to them, a pink ribbon probably didn’t symbolize the battle against breast cancer like it does for us. And plenty of the symbols do make sense, if you just think about them a little bit. A lemon? Well, that’s the simultaneous bitterness and sweetness of life. How about a delicious looking strawberry with a small spot of mold on it? Life is good but short, so enjoy it while you can. See – it’s not so hard to figure out, is it?

Almond Branches in Bloom, painting by Vincent van Gogh - Framed art poster	Almond Branches in Bloom, painting by Vincent van Gogh - Oil on Canvas

Many may ask, how is a hand painted reproduction different from a print? Why should I commission a reproduction of an image when I can just buy a print at a poster store or order an enlargement of my picture through an online photo printing service?