Friendships and van Gogh

Friendships

As I thought about how to kick off this post I started to think about the process as making friends as an adult.

When you’re young, your world is so small. Your connections are the people you know from school or your immediate community. For kids today I am sure the world feels a lot larger with social media, but still, when young, most of your friends are people you interact with in person on a regular basis.

So many of my friends that I have made as an adult, and still consider close, I have not seen in person in years and there are a good handful of them where we have never even lived in the same city and I’ve never been to their house. I have one friend (though I did spend the night at her place once en route to another location) that I met on a vacation on an island, and the majority of the time we have spent together has been on other islands and a few days in the desert.

Sitting here typing I realize that I had categorized my friends as “school” friends and “adult” friends.

Friends I made up until the day I graduated University and then friends I made after.

I’m laughing a little at myself realizing now that I’ve spent just as much of my life after school than I ever did in school and that 1) I don’t really need to categorize friends in any time bound way 2) if I am going to do that I should update my criteria, because the older we all get the less that line in the sand exists.

There will be a certain nostalgia for early-life friends for many reasons. Friends who we knew when we were half-baked humans - none of us were fully formed, mind or body. We were impressionable. We knew each other’s parents and siblings and houses and had sleepovers together. It’s overall a different experience often than friends you make as an adult.

Molli

Opening my computer today I was excited to write this post about my latest painting and my friend Molli.

Most of my “adult” friends (still working on removing this mental classification) are friends I have met at work, and the same is true for Molli. In “adult” friend fashion, at least in my version of it, we don’t live in the same city, we don’t see each other on a regular basis, and we’ve actually only met twice in person, though many, many times on Zoom.

Molli is a talented writer, wonderful wife and mother of two, and like my husband and I, has lived in many different places in the last decade.

Since we would be meeting in person earlier this year in Seattle, I thought it was a great opportunity to create something for her and hand-deliver it!

Her favorite artist is van Gogh, so we talked about a few inspirations for a small work for her office.

As you all might be aware, I spend much of my mental art capacity obsessing over Italian Renaissance paintings, and though I do know of van Gogh’s works, this was a great opportunity for me to dive a bit deeper into his portfolio and learn more about what he had created.

My favorite are his series from his time in Saint-Paul Asylum in Saint-Rémy.

Using his “Window in the Studio” as a baseline for the composition, I then incorporated more of his famous works on the studio walls and as the landscape in the background.

It was a really fun piece to paint and I was excited to be able to share it with Molli in person :)

Window in The Studio, A Variation.

5” x 7”, 2024

Breaking Down the Inspirations

Van Gogh’s Window in the Studio

This painting is from the year in the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, painted September-October 1889. These are some of my favourite works of his for their child-like effect and architectural elements.