What I love most about this drawing is the impulse. That need to draw, to reach outward through the simplest gesture of pencil on paper. I have never thought of myself as an artist. I lack the trained hand, the practiced precision. Yet I love to draw. That impulse alone connects me to Van Gogh. Beneath the mythology that surrounds him, the suffering and brilliance, there remains a profoundly human act: the desire to translate seeing into line.
In this sketch I witness his way of apprehending the world. The trees are alive; they twist and bend as if caught in breath or thought. The landscape is not static but rhythmic, alive with motion. Here, before the colors of his canvases, he builds the skeleton of vision. It is a glimpse inside the mind before expression bursts outward. As Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote of Cézanne, “He no longer paints what he sees, but what remains in his memory of it.” Van Gogh too was painting memory. He painted an internal weather system of sight and emotion. His lines are not description but translation.
Every artist, perhaps every person, lives within two landscapes: the interior and the exterior. We imagine, dream, and remember in one; we walk, speak, and act in the other. Van Gogh’s pencil hovers exactly at their meeting point. His marks are not merely representation but mediation, translating sensation into form. In the curve of a trunk or the trembling contour of a branch, he records the dialogue between his inner weather and the world beyond his window.
Philosophers of perception have long wrestled with this boundary. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that “the world is not what I think, but what I live through.” To draw, then, is to live one’s seeing. It is to make the act of perception visible. What Van Gogh reveals here is that perception is never passive. It is charged with feeling, shaped by temperament and time. His line is his consciousness in motion.
I think often about that same threshold. My own sketches, as uneven and tentative as they may be, are less about accuracy than about finding a bridge between the worlds I inhabit. The act of drawing reminds me that seeing is never neutral; it is filtered through memory, emotion, fatigue, hope. To draw, even clumsily, is to confess how I see and to let the inner rhythm spill onto paper. Paul Klee described this process simply: “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” That, to me, is what Van Gogh achieves here, not a landscape of trees and wind, but a landscape of mind.
There is something deeply psychological in that realization. Carl Jung once suggested that art “is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.” Creativity emerges not as decoration but as necessity. Van Gogh’s drawing, made within the quiet confinement of the asylum, carries that necessity. The garden he drew may have been bounded by walls, but his imagination was not. Each mark affirms what Jung called “the creative spirit that lives in every man,” the part of us that shapes meaning from the raw material of experience.
Perhaps this is what gives such sketches their quiet power. They are not finished statements but beginnings. They provide the evidence of life still forming itself. Van Gogh’s drawing, made within the walls of the asylum, suggests that creation itself can be an act of survival. Each line declares: I am still perceiving; therefore I am still here.
In a world often obsessed with the finished product, I find comfort in these unfinished gestures. They remind me that our inner worlds are works in progress, constantly revised by what we encounter. Just as Van Gogh constructed the skeleton before the paint, we too build invisible structures within—beliefs, memories, emotional contours—that determine the shape of our outer lives. Our visible world is, in the end, a reflection of our invisible one.
Maybe that is all art ever needs to be: a trembling line between what we feel and what we allow the world to see. The philosopher Gaston Bachelard once wrote, “The image, in its simplicity, has no need of scholarship; it is the product of a naïve consciousness.” To draw, then, is to return to that naïveté. It is to rediscover the purity of seeing and the courage to make it visible.
In this way, Van Gogh’s drawing becomes not merely an artifact of artistic process but a mirror of human existence itself. We live in the tension between our private gardens and the vast, uncontrollable world beyond. We draw our lines, imperfectly, to bridge the distance between them.
Coda
I recognize that same impulse in myself. That need to make marks, to doodle in the margins, to write a line of thought before it escapes. My journal, both the physical and the one here, are filled with fragments: spirals, faces, abstract forms, bits of sentences that never quite find their ending. These small gestures are not attempts at art so much as signs of life. When I draw, I feel myself re-entering the present moment, grounding the abstract noise of thought in something tangible.
In teaching, in writing, in simply moving through the day, I find that same pulse. The creative act, however modest, becomes a way to listen to my own interior landscape. The line, the word, the shape. All of them are means of tracing the invisible currents of thought and feeling. They do not need to be beautiful. They only need to be true to who I am.
And perhaps that is the ultimate lesson of Van Gogh’s drawing: to trust the impulse itself. To draw not for mastery, but for meaning. To understand that each mark, each attempt to make sense of what we see and feel, is a way of keeping the interior world alive, shaping it gently into a world we inhabit together.