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Jenny Swann

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Perhaps the Potato

“Van Gogh’s main subject in 1885 was perhaps the potato” - from Ingo F. Walther & Rainer Metzger, Van Gogh


I

In the year when his fellow artists
debated the merits of modernity,
he painted potatoes,

arranging them in baskets, now bronzed
by a raking sunset, now shining pale
as a jostle of fallen moons

in the thin light of dawn. In the year
when the zinc white blossoms
flecked and trembled into furrows,

and his fellow artists,
drunk on absinthe in Montmartre,
Vétheuil, crowed at the Dutchman

– brilliant with a palette knife,
d’accord, but crazy,
too intense for comfort –

he worked on his rotting hoard
in thick, impastoed purples,
cadmium yellow, raw sienna.

II

In Sainsbury’s, the banked displays
of ready-washed, unnatural King Edwards
gleam like the skulls of a Vanitas –

lacking the roughness, the cladding
of earth, the smeary scent of loam
in rain, the other-worldliness

that Van Gogh celebrated in his paeans
to the potato, without a care
for the laughter of his fellow painters.

 

Page(s) 25-26

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