Phil and Vince

Philip was a best friend through Cove School and Bay High and my first two years at Florida, after which I continued at Florida and Philip transferred to FSU for his major in Art or an Art specialization. Always imaginative and artistic, Philip was an artist, married the love of his life, lived the life of his own doing. Our close friendship phased out after he left Gainesville for Tallahassee and we went our separate ways. 

I last saw Philip at our wedding in 1957, and then not again until forty or so years later when Robert organized a reunion of our Cove School class of 1949, which I think must have been Spring 1999 or 2003? Memory serves, but it's not going to get a very big tip, because it doesn't serve well.

Born in 1935 a couple months after me, Philip died in 2018, https://www.fortmyersmemorial.com/obituaries/Philip-Johnson-21291/#!/Obituary, which greatly saddened me. He had come to a couple of our class reunions, we had resumed our friendship by mail, were keeping up with each other's lives, and during one Bay High class of 1953 reunion he had come to visit Linda and me at our home, The Old Place. He was widowed when we were in our seventies, and one year, remembering my lifetime love of cars, he mailed me a brochure of his late-life girlfriend's Porsche Boxster; and he mailed me a photograph of the two of them happily stepping off a cruise liner onto a pier at some Mediterranean seaport. Philip found joy in life, and happiness.

Where am I going with this? It's about the artist Vincent Van Gogh, who painted in a startling style.

Couple of his paintings

shown here. Philip liked to be precise about some things, and I remember the day he came out of class and corrected my pronunciation of the artist's name. Not our American style "van-Go" but "fon-GOCK", with a rasping, guttural German "ch" sound to the end of it. As in "ich" or Hebrew "chet", pushing air across the roof of the mouth for the sound of a cat hissing. chhhhh

Anyway, Philip liked to be able to correct me. At some point he decided to be called Phil, but when he joined us for second grade at Cove School it was Philip, and I stuck with Philip.

My roommate our freshman year at Florida, Philip was an interesting friend, and I miss knowing he's somewhere in life with me.

His correcting me about von-GOCHHH comes inevitably to mind when I see a Van Gogh painting, my favorite not being one of his bright and distinctively Vincent paintings, but a dark almost dismal one, "the potato eaters"

which I think is remarkable, the pinched, maybe even hungry, malnourished young man to the left who knows there's nothing on the table but potatoes forever, at his left hand and to our right the young woman seems to be gazing lovingly at the young man and I wonder if they're bumping knees together under the table and thinking of later, the darkness of the room and of everyone's clothing, the bowl of boiled potatoes, some hands with fingers holding a potato or holding a fork or knife jabbing for a potato; the woman pouring tea into cups for everyone, the oil lamp hanging overhead and the light it casts on faces and on the dish of potatoes while shadowing most everything else, the windows in the background. The light in the room seems to get better as my eyes become accustomed to the darkness there.

From what I've read about the painting, Vincent Van Gogh seemed to think it was his best work, which I like it better than his brighter paintings because of the sense of the people I get from it, their place in life, maybe the deprivation and darkness in their lives as individuals and as a family. That young man reminds me of many photographs I've seen of, well I'll just say it, "poor white trash" Confederate soldiers, still boys, youth, who grew up with never enough to eat on the table.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite paintings, and it's either incidental or coincidental that seeing it always brings Philip to mind. In the mid-1950s our lives went totally different directions, but sort of came back together in a way at the end. To me, Philip never changed how he looked. When he walked up the front steps to my house, my first time seeing him in some four decades, I said, "I'd have recognized you anywhere, you haven't changed at all." To which he said, "Well, you certainly have."

Looking at the potato eaters, I can't help but wonder how their lives turned out. Was there laughter around the table that night? What are the relationships? Did the young woman have children or a child with the young man, or was he her brother? Van Gogh painted it in 1885, so everyone sitting there is long dead, how did each person die? Did either of the men, or any of their sons die in war? I love boiled potatoes, but had there ever been, or was there ever later, a bit of beef or sausage and bread or cheese or a sugary pudding on the table in that room? Was their village, or wherever they were, a good place to live and love?

"A starry night" and the flowers painting are fine, but they don't make me stop and wonder and contemplate life like the potato eaters do.

ABC&PTL

T