There are two paintings by Van Gogh that I love. The first is pretty iconic, one that you will probably be able to visualise straight away. Van Gogh’s Chair is a simple, plain wooden seat, straw-bottomed, sitting empty on terracotta tiles in a yellow room. It is striking and forlorn and wistful all at the same time and on the seat, his pipe and a pouch of tobacco.
The second painting is Paul Gauguin’s Chair which was done as the first Chair's companion piece at exactly the same time, in December 1888.
Gauguin’s is grander. A plush armchair, deep reds and greens, painted at night. On the cushion sits two novels and a lit candle. Its a nod to his friends intellect perhaps, or his enlightenment ideals. Van Gogh apparently had a lot of respect and admiration for Gauguin which by all accounts was not reciprocated.
Van Gogh painted these twin portraits while his friendship with Gauguin was collapsing. They had come together in the south of France, full of ambition, planning to build a shared studio, a way of working, a legacy alongside each other.
It lasted nine weeks before it fell apart. It ended with Van Gogh’s breakdown, the famous severing of his own ear, as well as Gauguin’s permanent departure. For me this reminds me of myself and my relationship with my friend Ethan. I worked with him on some sculptures of our mutual friend Jack, who had killed himself in Vietnam on a job teaching english to the natives. Jack had a long struggle with gambling addiction which he had hidden with charisma and bravado. My friendship eith Ethan, and my relationship with his sister, collapsed too, a week before Ethan passed away. So the painting have a unique meaning for me.
The National Gallery describes the Van Gogh's paintings as “surrogate portraits”. It speaks of the two men, facing each other. Its a metaphor for the emptiness that came after, or perhaps even before they left each other for good.
The paintings metaphorically possesses but also refer to the emptiness of their relationship both in the makong and the loss.
It is paints a story of two men who shared something significant and then lost it. Van Gogh seemed to have painted one chair facing left, one facing right. As if they were always meant to be looking towards each other. As if the conversation between him and his friend were ongoing.
I lost two of my closest friends in the space of a couple of years. Their chairs are empty now now. And that image, those two paintings, those two holes, are the closest thing I’ve found to expressing what it feels like.
Jack’s Chair
Jack killed himself. He had a gambling addiction. It is a condition that doesn’t leave visible marks, the kind that most people don’t take as seriously as other things like cancer or diabetes. There was no obvious signs at first. He got fatter and more depressed perhaps. He was always chronically late. But gambling addiction ate away at him, hollowing him out from the inside, over time burning through his money, his self-worth, and finally his hope and his future.
I didn’t know how bad it was to be honest. I didn't know what he was going through and he didn't want me to know. At least I think. That sentence is one I’ve turned over in my head. Whether I should have known. Whether there were things I missed, conversations I should have had, moments where I could have done something different.
Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about his father’s chair, after his father died. He said that when he came home and found the chair still drawn up to the table, with the books and papers still on it from the day before, he felt as miserable as he did as a child. His farther's absence was painted in. A hole in time and space where that person was and should have been still. And unfortunately I feel the same thing.
Jack the lad. He was funny. The kind of guy that has you laughing before he’d finished the sentence. He was kind as well, quietly, without making a performance of it.
I miss him in a way that still catches me off guard. A song comes on. Someone makes exactly the joke he would have made. A bit of Alan-Partridge-esque dialogue. There were are again crouched, giggling in his loft stoned while his dad banged on the door downstairs yelling he can smell weed and we need to leave.
His chair was empty when i got married to Sàra. He never met my kids or organised my stag do or met me at the pub every once in a while. My past feels like its unravelled.
Bereavement is like a hole that opens up inside of me. I sometimes feel I will always be empty. Those holes are weighty, pysical things. I have had to learn to live alongside them rather than fill them in...
Ethan’s Chair
A year and a half after Jack left, Ethan died too. Some sort of overdose i was told. Cocain and alcohol I think. He was young but he did always plan to die before he got old. Live fast die young. A true punk
What made Ethan’s death a different kind of grief was that things had broken down between me and his sister shortly before he died. I won’t lay out the specifics. What matters is that by the time I lost him, I had already lost access to him in certain ways, and when he died, any possibility of resolving what had gone wrong went in a puff of smoke.
...
Van Gogh painted Gauguin’s Chair as a representation, a physical embodiment of Gauguin’s absence. He painted it after the friendship had fractured, and before Gauguin had cessed all contact. People who have studied the painting talk about the candle on the seat as the light Van Gogh believed Gauguin brought to his life and work. It might be reading too much into it but when Gauguin left, that candle kept burning in the painting. Fixed in time. Inextinguishable. And that gives me hope.
To be left holding the candle of a friendship that ended badly, in a room that the other person has already left. With the gaping abyss completely invisible to everyone around you.but there is still a candle.
Van Gogh himself wrote that “before illness forced me to enter a home, I tried to paint his empty chair.” I dont think he finished it before the breakdown. He came back to it afterwards, still trying. This is a hopeful kind of desperation, a pathetic kind of courage, and I look back at some of my own work in exactly the same way.
With Ethan’s death came a specific kind of grief that is uniquely difficult, the grief of the most brutal abandonment. Instead of dropping the mic, he dropped nail bombs. A terrorist attack and a school shooting on his own friends and family. And I don't just feel sadness but also anger at him. The fool... and guilt, and a directionless. A frustrated need for closure that has nowhere to go. The door is closed. The conversation is over. The crude, half finished painting is hanging over me, advertising my failure and ineptitude and moral decay.
I was angry at Ethan's sister for a long time too. And she with me. She told my friend i was a terrible human being. That he should stay away from me. I’ve been angry at myself. Angry at the situation I created so unwittingly. Angry that he died before i could speak to him about the mess i had made breaking up with his sister via text. That anger is one of the most exhausting things I’ve ever carried, because unlike sadness, it has no natural release. It just burns down and down until it erupts.
What I Reached For Instead
When Jack died, I started drinking more. When Ethan died, it got worse. Not in any catastrophic, visible way. I still functioned, still showed up, still managed to appear roughly intact. But in the evenings, alone with all of it, I was using to numb myself.
The irony of that is not lost on me. Here I was, grieving two people taken in part by the consequences of substances and addiction, and I was leaning on substances to cope with the grief. I think about Van Gogh’s pipe, sitting on his chair in that painting. He smoked partly on the advice of Charles Dickens apparently, who recommended it as a remedy for melancholia. Smoking was his constant pleasure, helping him to relax, as one commentator put it.
Van Gogh self-medicated with absinthe, with tobacco, with an almost punishing intensity of work. Which is exactly what i did producing patings and finishing my PhD. It didn’t save him. And it didnt save me.
I don't know whether it made his art better or worse. But art like this is a processing. A regurgitating. Reaching for something to dull the pain is a logical way to deal with things if your in that head space, it seems a reasonable coping mechanism. But for me it has, over time, intensified the pain and made things worse Grief that gets numbed doesn’t get processed. It gets postponed. And it has come back heavier.
In the aftermath of Jacks death a lot of my friends in Sheffield were running schemes where they used free bets as a way to start a scheme to make lots of money from online gambling without ever putting in their own money. I myself tried it a won £300. I still sometimes memorialise the anniversary of Jack's death by buying a lottery ticket and believing I could win…
There’s something particularly complicated about using substances to grieve people who were themselves taken in by them. I’ve had to be very honest with myself about what I was doing and why. It’s easy to beat yourself up. It’s harder to just look at the thing plainly and decide to do things differently.
The Candle That Stays Lit
After Van Gogh’s breakdown and hospitalisation, the two chair paintings were separated. His own plain chair ended up at the National Gallery in London. Gauguin’s luxurious chair went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They were always painted as a pair, meant to face each other. And now they are in different countries. I cant help feeling like that is a perfect representation of what I feel as im writing and thinking about these two glorious pieces of art.
When i think about Van Goghs paintings I thoight: What do I want? Do I want to forget them and move on? But closure isnt a destination you reach. As if the right sequence of steps will deliver resolution. In my experience, that’s not happened.
There is no resolution with Ethan. But his memories, or at least my version of them linger with me. I feel like my childhood with them would die with me unless I write about them and imprint them in something somewhere. The times on Bannerdale fields, laughing in the sun. Playing football and messing about. The relationship with them. That I might have had, isn’t on offer. Apologies or acknowledgements in either direction don't seem appropriate.
Closure is not a thing. It’s not something you construct, or achieve. Its just absence of grief. Or a hole. A physical thing and I want to stop waiting for the story to have a different ending. To carry it differently.
Van Gogh wrote that “Empty chairs... are many, more will come.” shortly after his father died, when he understood that loss was not a singular event but a fact of life. I don’t find that bleak, exactly.
Although we live in a vast and largely unknowable universe where an individual life, even the most extraordinary, is a grain of sand, we still find meaning with each other. A kind of hopeful nihilism.
And in Van Gogh's paintings there is the same kind of solidarity across time with everyone who has sat in a room and felt the particular weight of a chair that should be occupied and is empty.
I’ve been talking to people. I’ve beenb honest about how much I’ve been avoiding rather than coping. I’ve been trying to be with the dead. These were the things we used to do. This is my hinterland now. I feel the things I’m feeling. Sometimes it goes better than others. The anger about Ethan still surfaces. The guilt about Jack too.
I still think about his lion and the painting me and Ethan did together of the lion tree. I cut it into pieces and put it in a skip…
I still think about conversations I had with Ethan, and ones I wish I’d had.
P.S
I wrote this because I spent a long time feeling like I couldn’t talk about this particular combination of grief and anger, and the lack of closure, and the “too much drinking” that nobody was quite naming, and the guilt that arrives when the losses are tangled up with addiction and broken relationships and parenthood and all the things that don’t fit neatly into the narrative that lands like an anvil on the person that you thought you knew. And then I think who am I to think these things...
If you’ve lost someone and it was complicated or if there was unfinished business, like you weren’t quite allowed to grieve them straightforwardly, or if the circumstances of their death made the grief sharper and stranger, that is real, and it is hard.
And if drugs are the answer then I would be very surprised but I understand the logic. Although I thought I met God once and he was not happy with me...
