If you are ever in Cleveland and you don't know what to do, if you think it's all abandoned buildings and ole' steel mills and grey smoke stacks and bleak skies, well then take a turn and visit the Cleveland Museum of Art. There, among many many things, you will find a painting that Mr.Vincent Van Gogh painted in the last months of his life in 1890. It is the portrait of 13 yr. old Adeline Ravoux. Though I get annoyed at reading descriptions of paintings in Art books, I'm gonna give it a shot as long as you remember the only real way to experience paintings, is in the physical world, in their presence/absence sorcery exchange.
Up close you can see the thick brush strokes of her face and light hair. Her eyebrows are bent in consternation. Before I read officially that the person in the painting in real life was 13 yrs old I figured she was several years older. The thick globs of paint for her hair, her dress and especially her face with its look of resigned sadness as she peers out at nothing in particular indicate a laborious heaviness. She seems to carry the look of one who has been put to work hard her whole life. Her look says I am sick to death of manual labor and I will not wear a false mask or put on an act. Since she was the daughter of the man who owned the Inn where Van Gogh was staying in Auvers, north of Paris, one could assume she was kept busy tending to rooms and guests and a multitude of chores.
And it seems we juxtapose this heavy, gritty blue collar feel against the beauty of this vital young lady with her long hair pulled back in a tail and whose colors and color combinations do something to me mysterious and effect the overall vibe of the painting like the colors in a hip current film by Tarantino or the Cohen Brothers and seems futuristic for its time. Imagine sea-foam green, almost a fluorescent green but not really,(this is her dress) and imagine it against a thick black background. Now imagine her face. She does not look at the viewer. She seems to be biding her time until she may be freed from this posing obligation.
Perhaps the girl's Father wanted a painting of his daughter and maybe it paid Van Gogh's rent for a few days. I don't know and I don't need to know. Every time I am in Cleveland and at the Museum I go back to this painting. I like to see her as someone in her twenties who didn't let the grime and shit and labor of life bring her down. Instead she shined and followed her dreams. I thought about easy metaphors about the city itself but I thought again. Then I thought about how this painting was once owned by one of the wealthiest families in Cleveland. Let me re-focus.
She is the way I like women. No make up, nothing opulent and gaudy. Though Van Gogh's use of color is bold and full of force and a big reason why this appeals to me on different levels, its also the appeal of Adeline's disgruntled yet stoic patience as she waits to be set free from the pose, perhaps from the Inn, her Father, from her life style. She's too damn pretty and too damn smart to just be the Inn Keeper's Daughter.
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