Enclosed field with rising sun 1889

Curator: Vincent van Gogh’s “Enclosed Field with Rising Sun," an oil painting from 1889. It resides in a private collection now, but looking at this… the light is almost blinding. What are your first thoughts? Editor: Electric! I’m struck by the way the landscape writhes. The colors are so vibrant. It’s as if the field itself is alive, reaching for the sun. Curator: That energy you're picking up, it practically vibrates off the canvas. It feels intensely personal, doesn’t it? That enclosed space. A symbol of safety, perhaps, or maybe confinement. The field protected, or the viewer, hemmed in by that wall of red stones? Editor: Walls…always layered with meaning. On the one hand, the boundary separates; the red perhaps warning or signalling what’s out of bounds, but at the same time, a shelter is promised. Curator: Consider also that blazing sun. Traditionally, the sun is about birth and re-birth, about hope, about masculine strength. Van Gogh transforms it, though. Editor: Definitely not serene or balanced, which gives it an edge. All those brushstrokes swirling...they could represent the torment he experienced, couldn’t they? The swirling chaos just under the surface. Even the promise of dawn comes with anxiety here, a fight to contain his own tempestuous emotions. Curator: His thick application of paint, that impasto technique...it’s almost like he sculpted the scene rather than painted it. I can’t help thinking that each stroke captures a feeling, a surge of energy made physical. This wasn’t just a painting; it was an exorcism of his inner turmoil. Editor: Beautifully put! Looking at it this way makes me see that Van Gogh captured a liminal moment— the boundary between darkness and light, sanity and madness, fear and hope. No tidy separation but everything blended on this beautiful canvas. Curator: Van Gogh found beauty even within that struggle. A sunrise can signal the opportunity to begin again...to leave behind all that haunted you the previous night, no? Editor: Precisely. So even if it's raw and visceral, the promise remains. Which may be, in the end, what haunts us most.