Her dialogues with Van Gogh went like this:

“But your way ends in suicide,” she said.

“Yours begins there,” he said.

“Poppycock, Go!”

She painted her famous Seascape with Two Ferries then.

 

And like this:

“The imagination,” he said.

“Enough about the imagination. When will you men finally see the imagination for what it is.  A metonym for your penis.  An artist to be an artist must be all eye.  Pure eye. Mere eye.”

Then she painted her famous Man-eating Rock series.

 

Or like this:

“Are you sure you understand what a metonym is,” he said.

“Are you?” she said and then finished the final strokes on the canvas she called Fisk’s Field with Cypress Trees.

“These,” he said. He handled a number of her charcoal sketches.

“You don’t approve,” she said.

“You need a prostitute,” he said, then let the sketches fall.

“What would I do with a prostitute?”

“Whatever you like.”

“Whatever you like,” she said.

“You underestimate yourself, Virginia.”

“It is you, Go, who underestimate me.”

*

The sentient and almost perspicacious Osage Orange; the primeval Late Autumn with Several Oak Trees; the savagely tender Deer Culling, Mashomack, 1970; the mysterious Two Shipwrecks; the joyous Thanksgiving, 1987; the miraculous Oysters and Goblet; the troubling Frozen Causeway; the misunderstood Spring Vase; the much lauded Untitled Landscape; the prescient and surprisingly empathetic Hale-Bopp.

*

Virginia Bering taught kindergarten and, when the need arose, first grade.  That was her business. Teaching children.  Her calling, which was no hobby—quite the opposite, and career too crass and crude a word—her vocation was painting.  Landscape painting primarily, en plein air, though she was an equally accomplished still-life painter and figurative painter of portraits.  Nothing symbolic or narrative, for to her, art meant holding off time for real things, the real things of this world.  Transcendence was for Concord and her sages.  Stories were for children.

Her daughter visited her sometimes.   They’d sit in the parlor drinking coffee. They’d trained themselves to be silent a long while and only when one of them stirred to get up would they begin.

“I see you sold Pan Was No Gentlemen,” her daughter said.

“That’s a wicked one, isn’t it?”

“It is.  I wonder if they get it.”

“Kiriakopoulos is a fool.”

“He certainly talks a lot.”

“Without saying much.  Is there a better definition of a fool?”

“I don’t know one.”

Their eyes shifted each of them back to the parlor window which was big and clear and overlooked (as her studio did, too) Winters Bay.

“I swear, Mother, I’ve seen other painters depict these same ferry boats. To them they are blurry streaks.  Not to you.  To you, they are individuals.”

“They are, and whether I see them as such or not, they are.  I learned that being your mother.”

“Being a mother.”

“That too.  I wonder if men learn that lesson about themselves.”

“If they do they don’t become artists.”

“That’s for sure.”

“Maybe at the end it hits them.  Their last breath already expired and the world still turning, the people in it no more unhappy than they were before.”

“No happier either.”

“Exactly that.  Exactly that.  We don’t add a single thing to paradise.  There is no God, but what we see and that we leave.”

After coffee she would herself leave, and her mother would be left alone with the aftertaste of the coffee, a few crumbs on the saucer, the chair warm where her very daughter had been. Then she would think her thoughts.  The horizon was always steadiest after her daughter left.  Her heart still, however tumultuous the tiny sea or the crawling surf below, and the shelf where her life dropped off and everything else worthwhile began, there, absolute, real.

*

He scrutinized the canvas appearing over her shoulder, then at her elbow, at a distance, up close.  He rubbed his chin in grim appraisal.

“I’ve been married,” she said.

“And divorced, I bet.”

“Widowed,” she said.

“Either way they leave.”

“Indeed we all do.”

“Is that wisdom or a joke?”

“Neither.  I’m too old for both.”

“Seems to me, Virginia, we are never too old for wisdom.  And who’s better suited to appreciate the big cosmic joke than the old?”

“That’s just it, Go.  I don’t think it is a joke.  Or cosmic. Our troubles are our troubles.  So are our solutions.”

“What about wisdom?”

“I’ll leave wisdom to the wise.  They need it more than I do.”

“We’ll see.”

“You’d need eyes to see.”

“A joke!”

“The clearer the eye,” she said, “the clearer the vision.”  She turned from her canvas to him.  No joke.

*

“Why would a woman make art anyway?  Isn’t this enough?” he said.

“What?”

“Life!  Life!  Isn’t life enough?”

“Men make art.”

“Men make art because they can’t make life.  There’s always that. An irony between them and life, which artists know as love.”

“I love.”

“And you make art?”

“And I make art.”

“And you made life.”

“I made a life.  I made a life, and I live my own.”

“Too much.”

“For you art is envy, and love jealousy.  But you want to possess.”

“What do you want?”

“To arrest.  To hold.  Possession is about clutching and grasping.  Art is about letting go.”

“That’s the mother in you.”

“No. Mothers don’t let go. They release.”

*

That one she called Orient Point, IV of XVIII.

*

Medieval art started from a perspective opposite her own.  But it made sense. It was as uncompromising.  The renaissance was a disaster.  The Dutch knew something about reality, being mostly merchants, but they cheated, unsurprisingly, being mostly merchants—like a butcher with his thumb on the scale.  Turner was too self-absorbed.  The impressionists appealed only to teenage girls. Picasso was an obvious charlatan.  Warhol, oddly, when he didn’t present himself as mere surveillance, intrigued her.  His early illustrations of women’s shoes were marginally successful.  When she visited the MET over the years, it was to a still-life of oysters she would return.  There is a cracked goblet, and the implication of a narrative, certainly a mood, but these are beside the point.  The oysters are the point, the living breathing oysters, alive in the glimmer of being.  Not some other oysters or some symbol of oysters but this magnificent array, exactly as they are, exactly as they should be eaten and enjoyed, no accoutrement sufficient, no lemon or mignonette necessary.

“What about me?” he said.  “Virginia?”

“Oh, you, Go, you poor cracked earnest amateur, we are like parallel lines.  Go as far as we like in either direction, we will never meet.”