Kathrine Lovell

When I was a junior at RISD, the painting department took us up to Cambridge to see the museums at Harvard. The first place we went into was the Fogg Museum. It was kind of a murky, grey day. Up on the second floor in a small gallery off the main area, was a painting by Van Gogh. It was his self-portrait after he cut off his ear. When I was about 11 or 12 years old, my mother had cut out a photograph from a magazine that was a cropped version of this painting; you couldn’t see the bandaged ear. It hung on the bulletin board in the kitchen across from my seat at the table. Every day of my life, I looked at that painting. I really actually got sick of looking at it, it stopped being something to me. So here I am minding my own business, being somewhat cynical about looking at 19th century paintings and I come around the corner in to the dim gallery and there is this painting, almost glowing. It was so stunningly beautiful and so not a photograph and so real, that I started to cry. It made me understand why paintings should be seen. I thought I had learned everything I was going to learn from looking at the reproduction of that painting, until I finally saw it in person. I will never get over how he used a small curve of Alizarin Crimson to create the curve of his own lower lip.
-Kathrine Lovell
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