Francesca DeCaire

Here is a series of beads that are inspired by the herb wormwood, a fragrant plant with an intriguing history. Used as an ingredient of green absinth which Van Gogh drank nightly at local taverns in France, it induced visions that inspired his vivid, swirling paintings.

1.

As the glass begins to melt my mind wanders again. Vincent’s letters have made a deep impression upon my mind and I can’t stop thinking about his genius and what inspired him. Wormwood grows in my mother’s garden. She told me that it was the hallucinatory ingredient in absinth. I wonder, how much did it come into play in Vincents art? I turn the mandrill as the hot green glass flows like liquid down my throat.

2.

Gazing through the green part of the torch flame, absinth colored glass melts on the mandrel and a shadowy, dark figure appears. Perhaps, as the story goes, Gauguin is stalking Van Gogh as he walks to the tavern in Arles.

3.

With the help of absinth Van Gogh overcomes all inhibitions. He sets up his easel under the hot Provence sun. He is finally going to use red the way he really wants. Scarlet paint is applied in a bold swath, right in the center of the canvas. It bleeds behind roiling cumulus clouds only to swim through and reappear under transparent layers of umber and lavender.

4.

“Why do you have to outline everything in black like a child’s drawing?” Gauguin is screaming again. Vincent was excited at first, when his friend from Paris joined him, but they are having yet another heated argument over technique. For Vincent painting is all passion flowing straight from his heart, but Gauguin is all intellect. Vincent sets down his palette knife and huddles in a patch of the strange silvery weed growing in the rock cliffs.