Van Gogh and the Making of a Home

By Anjali Krishna

In soft colors, above my bed, hangs Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom.” This is his room in Arles, the city south of Paris to which he escaped in search of warmth and the quiet life. Muted, calm, and typically excellent, “The Bedroom” depicts the rest Van Gogh found in the city and the home with his things where he tried to find peace. Van Gogh failed — he would commit himself to an insane asylum just months after completing this painting. But I have faith in “The Bedroom” and the way it carries itself, with a tentative strength and the atmosphere of a home.

I write this in my West Campus apartment, where leather peels off the couch to stick to Sahan’s shirt and Jada’s fake orange flowers sit on the coffee table. Did Van Gogh’s yellow wooden chair ever leave chipped paint in his hair?

I live here with my closest friends and we fight and clean and watch television like family. Neha’s shiny tumbler is on the kitchen counter and my drying rack is on the balcony. There are ashes ingrained in the dining room chairs outside that we aren’t sure will come out. A candle Nithya left here by accident ages ago — vanilla, of course, only she would buy that — is lit. The whole apartment smells like her.

I like to think that “The Bedroom,” too, is a collection of things borrowed and new, bought from shops when Van Gogh liked something through a window or left behind from an old tenant of The Yellow House. I can imagine him writing to his brother, Theo, about buying the glass tchotchkes on his desk, which turn into something lustrous when the sun hits them just right. It was the beautiful light, after all, which drew Van Gogh to Arles.

We picked our apartment because our neighbors did, and so did one of my roommates’ then-boyfriend. We picked this apartment because it was the cheapest, and what we thought was the only thing left as we tried to sign our first lease in November. We picked this apartment in November, and we moved in the following August, all of our lives and things intertwining.

Van Gogh lived in Arles, in la Maison Jeune containing “The Bedroom,” with his then-friend and fellow painter, Paul Gaugin. He’d hoped to establish something of an artists’ collective, envisioning Gaugin as its ingenious leader. Rumor goes that it was Gaugin who drove Van Gogh to madness, their constant disagreements, Gaugin’s arrogance and Van Gogh stubborn against it. But in “The Bedroom,” all lies at peace.

Not that peace ever existed in our home — from the first moment Rudra knocked on my door to tell me he’d begun moving in next door. Not that we didn’t drive each other insane about cabinet and fridge space, argue about the electricity bills and my vegetarian dishes in the sink. What Gaugin once wrote about Van Gogh resonates with me: “In spite of all this disorder, this mess, something shone out of his canvases and out of his talk, too.”

I like to imagine they knew each other — in that intimate way only roommates can memorize schedules and remember which anecdotes who would enjoy. Did they ever sit, side-by-side on the red bedspread, to compare sketches or days in the half-day’s sunlight? It’s easy to find something that “shines” as Gaugin puts it when surrounded by their strewn clothes and books. Vulnerability is a catalyst for warmth and understanding; what’s more understanding than knowing the way someone likes to keep their socks or how often they’ll clean a bathroom?

Perhaps there’s an inkling of friendship under the unfolded throw blankets strewn across the couch for me. My hands and feet are always cold, as cold as I often am cutting. But buried under those blankets and TV muted, my friends and I have come to understand one another.

Van Gogh and Gaugin weren’t like us, though. Their home was sparse, though bright and colorful. Ours is dimly lit and dismally decorated with mass-market wallpaper, bland in corporate grays and blues. Still, it’s full of things, things that I can consider ours together. I have the home Van Gogh sought. I wish he could have experienced it as well — something he searched and tried so hard to create, but dropped in my lap almost by accident. I treasure it now, knowing it keeps my life full, keeps me sane. I wonder if it would have done the same for Van Gogh, were he to find the right companions.





In a way, this is a love letter to my friends. Everything I do is. Because the things that shape our home are all each other’s. Does that make sense? Does it make sense that a home is not only the people who live in it, where your heart is, but it truly is where you hang your hat? Is it frivolous for me to think so much about the things we own as they represent and become us? It’s materialistic, I know. But isn’t there something ancient in making a home for yourself, in acquiring things that you like the look of so you can have them forever? Something that predates online overconsumption and celebrates whatever living really is?

We live together because we love each other. Even if we hadn’t, wouldn’t existing in that same space take us to some immediate level of friendship or intimacy? We know each other too well for it to be anything else.

And sure, we don’t talk to Areebah anymore but doesn’t some small part of her still belong to us because we know she sits at that table in front of her plastic Amazon mirror to put on her makeup every morning? Haven’t we each borrowed that broken blue hairdryer or worn that white sweater? I know the way she makes up her gray bedspread and arranges perfume in the cabinet. And that’s some kind of love, some lingering thing that aches of lying and laughter.

I’m certain Gaugin was at fault in Van Gogh’s eventual demise — I’ve never liked his paintings, with their obsessive orientalist tilt. He only came to Arles, after all, because Van Gogh’s brother promised him something like a stipend to sate his little brother’s wishes. I think it must have been impossible, in those days after Gaugin left, for Van Gogh to live amongst their collection of things, those items which they had loved and or used in daily practice together.

Did Gaugin leave anything behind in that rush to leave, or take anything of the man he began to know so intimately in their days of sharing a home? Was he reminded of his housemate just as I began to miss mine, accidentally carrying her green blouse across the ocean?

We buy things together, my roommates and I, and I wonder when we graduate and head elsewhere what we’ll do with the Firestick or porcelain flowers. I wonder if — cruelly — Gaugin returned to Arles for his things once Van Gogh died to remember his friend once more.

My friends belong to me in these objects. Every time I cook rice I’ll know that Neha taught me when to open her pressure cooker. When I glance at the green Heineken bottle filled with flowers on my nightstand, I’ll remember Charan teaching me how to open a beer on the edge of a table. When we are apart  — when they are gone or I’m halfway across the earth — I see them in everything, in everything which bloomed first in our first apartment, in all the things we shared.

I saw Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom” at the Art Institute in Chicago this summer. I looked at Van Gogh’s thick impasto and pleasant pastels and I felt him thickening paint, standing behind me in the crowded gallery with brushes in hand, sweat on his upper lip from effort and passion.

I felt a million miles away from home. I missed my friends and the life we’d built in our apartment. I missed talking on our couch late into the night and missing our morning classes together.

I missed looking up at my Amazon-order print, which came in a roll of twenty generalized Impressionist paintings while I stood in front of a masterpiece.

I wished, more than anything, to be back at our home together. ■