Both at his home and in his office, Russ Ramsey displays the print of the same Van Gogh painting. It’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, an iconically dark, melancholic portrait of the artist himself dazing toward the bottom right of the composition.
“It hangs there because it’s the kind of pastor that I want to be,” Ramsey told me. “It’s the kind of person that I want to be.”
For Ramsey, who is an author and pastor at Christ Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tennessee, the painting reveals Van Gogh, apparently wounded from an incident in an asylum, portrayed himself honestly — despite every incentive to leave out the bandage or abandon the portrayal altogether. His honesty not only tells about himself; it embodies the place of art in the life of faith. For Ramsey, art helps us better understand the complexities of our lives.
“Art has a way of presenting in aesthetically and technically beautiful ways some of the saddest stories that we tell as human beings,” said Ramsey. This is the point of his new book, Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart.
The most challenging chapter to write was on Joseph Mallord William Turner
He was an immensely private person and his art is a little bit of a deconstruction story without a lot of explanation. The first 20 years of his painting career were realistic, mathematical, and precise.
Then, he traveled to Italy to do some studies. When he came back, his paintings changed — almost overnight — into these compositions that look like they were done by impressionists, but this was 40 years before the impressionists. His earlier compositions started with sketches, and the later paintings have no indication of line work.
I had a sense that I was writing about the current phenomenon of deconstruction. The most cartoonish examples of deconstruction are people who just get tired of living the Christian life and decide not to do that anymore. But then there are other people who have experiences in their lives that are so intensely personal and so full of wounding and pain and layers of complication, that deconstruction is not necessarily a euphemism for walking away from their faith. At face value, they’re trying to sort out what they actually believe. And many people who go through that process emerge on the other side clinging to Christ more than ever. It’s so immensely personal that we often don’t get to know what really goes on inside a person.
Turner was that kind of a painter, where he was so private that he didn’t really disclose. But at the end of his life, when he was asked if his paintings should be distributed to various museums, he said, “Keep them together.” In his mind, the paintings that he painted during the first half of his career and the second half of his career belonged together — you can see 200 of them at the Tate Britain.
Turner’s was a difficult chapter to write because I didn’t feel like he was cooperating with me. I wish he’d explained himself better. But also, that’s the tension I love. We just have to live with the tension and assume we have countless people in our lives who are going through something similar.
As told to Abby Perry. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
