This painting is inspired by Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging” and one of Van Gogh’s sketches of a potato digger. I love both for the same reason. They emphasize beauty in the grit of life.
Malcolm Guite makes the comment that true poetry either starts in the heavens and searches the earth for ways to express what is seen there, or starts on the earth and brings out what is heavenly there. And I connected most strongly with the second. That’s what I want my art to be. That’s what I love most about Jesus too. Jesus came to earth and took on all our grit, from potato-digging sorts of things to the experiences of having his heart carved by friendship and closeness and betrayal. There’s a line in Van Gogh’s letters in which he describes the most depressing scene you could imagine, with starving people and dung hills and ash heaps, and he comments that it would make a beautiful painting. And I caught in that something of the vocation of the artist: to bring out the beauty in a thing where it wasn’t obvious. And that’s what Jesus does. Comes into our grit and says of what we despise, “This is beautiful and has profound dignity and I love it and it’s worth dying for to save.”
The poem is about Heaney watching his father digging for potatoes and ends with the lines,
“I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.”
A marveling at the men who’ve gone before him. He sees something in them that he can’t just fully copy in himself, because they are unrepeatable gifts. And so, he can dig with his pen into the beauty that they’ve shown him in their lives that maybe looked unremarkable from the outside. That’s another part of the artistic vocation. To be moved by the people who’ve shown us how to live, and to express in some art form (and also our lives to some extent) the treasures they’ve been, that they’ve lived and breathed. Sometimes I’ve had that same thought. The people around me who show me who God is so captivatingly, what spade have I to follow men like them?
I’ll dig with this brush.
