The Wheat Fields and the Crows

Van Gogh would have loved the day. The sun was a deep yellow, the ocean silver, the sky a vibrant blue and the hills a dusting of green.

In one distance you could see snow-capped mountains, in another a misty Santa Catalina. The very air shimmered with color, embracing us in streaks and halos of blinding iridescence.

You didn’t have to be a Van Gogh to understand at least some of what he understood so well, that we are travelers on a sea of color, small bits of humanity in a glory too complex to explain.

Call it nature, call it God’s creation, the name matters little. On its simplest terms, what the world offers in startling array is beauty in so many forms that all you’ve got to do is stop and look to see it.

I thought about this as I stood in line that shimmery day between storms, waiting to view the works of Van Gogh, the lonely and troubled Dutchman who has stunned heaven and history with his own understanding of the world.

Much has been said of the exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s west gallery, a funny little series of small rooms in what used to be a department store. And much of it has been negative.

Sure, Van Gogh was great, they’ve said, but the wait to get in was too long, the line was unbearable, the crowds were too large, the name of the exhibit wasn’t lyrical and wouldn’t it be swell if they had the wheat field and crows, the shoes and the potato eaters, all to themselves?

No.

*

*

Great art belongs to the people and I was glad to see them there in such variety and diversity on the day of my visit: ladies who lunch, men who work with their hands, kids with rings in their noses, old people with walkers, the handicapped in wheelchairs.

We were all the colors and languages of a city rapidly becoming the cosmopolis of the future in a line that snaked back through a large tent-like structure into a parking lot outside.

What I saw wasn’t a crowd but a celebration of individuals, each a dot or a brush stroke of a painting in progress. What I heard was a melody of languages for a concerto still being written.

Understand this, I hate lines. I dislike crowds. My best times are quiet moments with my wife or writing alone in a room of only distant sounds.

But I’d stand in a line five miles long and cram myself into a closet filled with tourists to be able to view the smallest work that Van Gogh ever created.

I’m one of the guys, not an art expert, but my wife knows art and has educated me over the years to appreciate what I’m seeing, like a child who, for the very first time, is introduced to a night filled with stars.

I stare in wonder, I absorb with pleasure.

Lines and crowds somehow ceased to matter once when we stood in line for three hours in a wind that chilled the bones to see Cezanne in Paris, and when we fought our way through hordes to view Monet in Chicago.

It’s what is at the end of the line that counts.

*

*

What the whiners have lost sight of is the genius, the insight, the pain and the splendor that waits at the end of this line. Van Gogh embodies it all in a single self-portrait, an awesome man in a felt hat with eyes that pierce, that follow, that study, that wonder.

Yes, there are crowds. Someone’s going to step in front of you, someone’s going to jostle you and many are going to block your view. But be still. Hold your ground. Absorb. And soon Van Gogh will wash over you in waves of color so deep and personal that the crowds will vanish and the room go silent.

What I’m saying is come to this exhibit. Drag your old man off the couch. Take a day off from work. Leave the office. Borrow the money for tickets. Bring your kids. Pay a baby-sitter. Drive, take a bus, walk.

This is something special, moments created more than a century ago to linger through time like a sunrise, touching something in each of us, calling us to really see that which glistens around us.

The world is a series of crows and wheat fields observed from different perspectives and filtered through the arcs and flashes of our lives. We mirror ourselves in the art we create.

I think about that now as I write. The day is dark and threatening, the sky heavy with the possibility of rain. It’s a Van Gogh sky and the landscape that lies below the darkness is a Van Gogh wheat field.

It’s all there. All we’ve got to do is pause for a moment and look.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com