A history of art [fic]
Title: A history of art
Author: shadowbyrd
Rating: PG - 13
Fandom: Doctor Who (2010)
Character(s): Vincent Van Gogh and Dr Black
Word Count: 1225
Summary: Time is no barrier to love.
A/N: I wrote this after seeing Vincent and The Doctor for the second time. I love this episode so much.
Every morning Rowan Black wakes up at eight o’clock. He washes and dresses and thunders down the stairs for breakfast. Every morning he passes a vivid landscape his mother put there when they moved in.
“What we really need is a window here,” she’d said to Rowan while she put it up. “But I think this will do very nicely. Something to cheer your father on his bad days.”
Rowan thinks father has been doing well enough lately; he’s almost too cheerful, with more smiles and energy and ideas and games than Rowan and mother can keep up with.
It’s a bright landscape. Rowan’s never seen a hill or a sky like it - when he was smaller (and stupid) he’d thought that that was what France looked like. He’d been disappointed when his parents took him there when he was six and found the plants and skies looked exactly the same as the ones in England.
In Rowan Black’s eight year old opinion it’s much better than having a window; he knows the sky outside his house doesn’t look like that.
He’s eleven when he’s pulled out of school and taken to the hospital. He doesn’t like hospitals, not for any of the reasons that he’s heard the other boys talk about - the stinging antiseptic smell, the feeling of dread knowing something’s wrong. It’s just such a dull looking place, just so many shades of pale grey.
He’s taken to a little room where his mother is red-eyed and smiling nervously. Rowan hates to see her try and be brave.
She takes his hands, tells him softly that father’s illness has finally gotten the better of him.
It was only a matter of time - depression may be acceptable in struggling writers or tortured artists, but people are even less prepared to suffer it from a proper middle class bank clerk.
He sits up all that night with a book of Van Gogh pictures his father bought him for Christmas one year, watching how the man goes from the grim and gritty Potato Eaters to the untamed colour and quiet passion of The starry night.
Two weeks later he busies himself painting, trying to funnel all his anger, resentment and sadness into making something. Creating something new and strong and beautiful out of all this darkness and misery.
Rowan is fifteen when he finally accepts that, for all his mother’s support and encouragement, he’s never going to be a painter.
It isn’t the world around him that speaks to him; it’s paintings. His own, when they are finished, speak nothing but nonsense - there is no story as with the Pre-Raphaelites, no mood or stray slant of light that might otherwise have been lost captured as with the Impressionists or wild dreams . There is no meaning to be found in them, because he cannot find a meaning to paint.
This epiphany doesn’t come as much of a shock to him as it seems to his family and friends when he tells them he doesn’t intend to pursue a career in art. He has always suspected that he is lacking in passion.
An encounter with Mr Van Gogh himself helps to disabuse him of this notion.
Van Gogh painted numerous self-portraits - many artists did and do, it’s much cheaper than hiring a model. This one, painted in the summer of 1887, isn’t the brightest or boldest of them, but there’s something about it, something about the eyes that captures Rowan’s attention.
He looks startled, as though he can see through this canvas, as though he can see his self portrait, his other works hanging in this gallery, how absorbed the people are in his paintings. Confusion and grief - and what must it have felt like to be mentally ill in those times? To be called a mad man until you started believing it yourself?
And there is something…beseeching about it. As though he’s pleading with whoever he’s looking at to look at him. To stop and just listen to him.
Rowan stops and sits in front of the picture to hear what he has to say. Rowan looks into Vincent Van Gogh’s dark eyes and falls in love.
The woman he will eventually marry also helps to disabuse him of this notion when they’re twenty. He’s studying Art history, she’s studying Economics and she has little interest in art when he first meets her, but for some reason keeps hassling him to tell her about his favourite artists and hangs on his every word.
“You just light up when you talk about them,” Iris says smiling in a way he thinks of as fond, but is so much more. “Especially the Sunflowers -”
“Vincent Van Gogh,” he corrects, tugging at her fingers.
“ - sometimes I wonder if you’ve actually met some of them down the pub, you seem to know them that well.”
Rowan scoffs. “I wish.”
“I don’t,” Iris says, poking him with her foot. “You ever met this Van Gogh character you’d probably run away with him and have a passionate love affair, forget all about me.”
After a few years, when he’s started thinking about rings, he takes her to Paris to the Musee d’Orsay paintings, brings her to a self-portrait of Van Gogh with a swimming blue background. It feels curiously like presenting her to his parents.
“Can you see it?” he asks, nervous and terribly hopeful that maybe he’s found someone who can see what he sees in all these strange paintings, the frozen faces of all these dead, great men and women.
She smiles at him, and for a moment he wonders if she’ll lie to mollify him. “No,” she says, squeezing his hand. “That’s why you’re here - to tell me about it.”
He buys a ring and proposes to her at the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Her wedding bouquet would have made a beautiful painting.
When his mother dies, Rowan moves heaven and earth to get her a wreath of sunflowers. They weren’t her favourite flowers, but it seems right somehow. Hers is not a death that should be mourned, lamenting the things that could have been, but a life to celebrated. She lived it magnificently, even if he says so himself.
That night when the museum closes to the public, Rowan stands for a while in front of that same self-portrait whose dark eyes he fell in love with all those years ago until his legs are too tired to hold him up and sits cross-legged on the floor like the children in the school groups that come in.
For the first time since he was a young he allowed himself to really wonder what could have happened had someone been able to help him - really help him. Would he have lived longer? Would he have continued to paint, and if he had what would those works be like?
He also wonders, selfishly, if Van Gogh’s work would have been so powerful, so starkly beautiful.
He thinks of that strangely frail, worn red-haired man who looked as though he was paying the price for living vibrantly, moved to tears by the people looking, admiring the pictures, by Dr Black’s inadequate hundred word summary of how Vincent Van Gogh changed the world.
As the colours in the painting blur together, he realises he’s weeping. He’s not entirely sure why.
A/N: The Potato Eaters was painted before Van Gogh began to really pursue painting - at the time he was studying theology and worked as a missionary.
Author: shadowbyrd
Rating: PG - 13
Fandom: Doctor Who (2010)
Character(s): Vincent Van Gogh and Dr Black
Word Count: 1225
Summary: Time is no barrier to love.
A/N: I wrote this after seeing Vincent and The Doctor for the second time. I love this episode so much.
Every morning Rowan Black wakes up at eight o’clock. He washes and dresses and thunders down the stairs for breakfast. Every morning he passes a vivid landscape his mother put there when they moved in.
“What we really need is a window here,” she’d said to Rowan while she put it up. “But I think this will do very nicely. Something to cheer your father on his bad days.”
Rowan thinks father has been doing well enough lately; he’s almost too cheerful, with more smiles and energy and ideas and games than Rowan and mother can keep up with.
It’s a bright landscape. Rowan’s never seen a hill or a sky like it - when he was smaller (and stupid) he’d thought that that was what France looked like. He’d been disappointed when his parents took him there when he was six and found the plants and skies looked exactly the same as the ones in England.
In Rowan Black’s eight year old opinion it’s much better than having a window; he knows the sky outside his house doesn’t look like that.
He’s eleven when he’s pulled out of school and taken to the hospital. He doesn’t like hospitals, not for any of the reasons that he’s heard the other boys talk about - the stinging antiseptic smell, the feeling of dread knowing something’s wrong. It’s just such a dull looking place, just so many shades of pale grey.
He’s taken to a little room where his mother is red-eyed and smiling nervously. Rowan hates to see her try and be brave.
She takes his hands, tells him softly that father’s illness has finally gotten the better of him.
It was only a matter of time - depression may be acceptable in struggling writers or tortured artists, but people are even less prepared to suffer it from a proper middle class bank clerk.
He sits up all that night with a book of Van Gogh pictures his father bought him for Christmas one year, watching how the man goes from the grim and gritty Potato Eaters to the untamed colour and quiet passion of The starry night.
Two weeks later he busies himself painting, trying to funnel all his anger, resentment and sadness into making something. Creating something new and strong and beautiful out of all this darkness and misery.
Rowan is fifteen when he finally accepts that, for all his mother’s support and encouragement, he’s never going to be a painter.
It isn’t the world around him that speaks to him; it’s paintings. His own, when they are finished, speak nothing but nonsense - there is no story as with the Pre-Raphaelites, no mood or stray slant of light that might otherwise have been lost captured as with the Impressionists or wild dreams . There is no meaning to be found in them, because he cannot find a meaning to paint.
This epiphany doesn’t come as much of a shock to him as it seems to his family and friends when he tells them he doesn’t intend to pursue a career in art. He has always suspected that he is lacking in passion.
An encounter with Mr Van Gogh himself helps to disabuse him of this notion.
Van Gogh painted numerous self-portraits - many artists did and do, it’s much cheaper than hiring a model. This one, painted in the summer of 1887, isn’t the brightest or boldest of them, but there’s something about it, something about the eyes that captures Rowan’s attention.
He looks startled, as though he can see through this canvas, as though he can see his self portrait, his other works hanging in this gallery, how absorbed the people are in his paintings. Confusion and grief - and what must it have felt like to be mentally ill in those times? To be called a mad man until you started believing it yourself?
And there is something…beseeching about it. As though he’s pleading with whoever he’s looking at to look at him. To stop and just listen to him.
Rowan stops and sits in front of the picture to hear what he has to say. Rowan looks into Vincent Van Gogh’s dark eyes and falls in love.
The woman he will eventually marry also helps to disabuse him of this notion when they’re twenty. He’s studying Art history, she’s studying Economics and she has little interest in art when he first meets her, but for some reason keeps hassling him to tell her about his favourite artists and hangs on his every word.
“You just light up when you talk about them,” Iris says smiling in a way he thinks of as fond, but is so much more. “Especially the Sunflowers -”
“Vincent Van Gogh,” he corrects, tugging at her fingers.
“ - sometimes I wonder if you’ve actually met some of them down the pub, you seem to know them that well.”
Rowan scoffs. “I wish.”
“I don’t,” Iris says, poking him with her foot. “You ever met this Van Gogh character you’d probably run away with him and have a passionate love affair, forget all about me.”
After a few years, when he’s started thinking about rings, he takes her to Paris to the Musee d’Orsay paintings, brings her to a self-portrait of Van Gogh with a swimming blue background. It feels curiously like presenting her to his parents.
“Can you see it?” he asks, nervous and terribly hopeful that maybe he’s found someone who can see what he sees in all these strange paintings, the frozen faces of all these dead, great men and women.
She smiles at him, and for a moment he wonders if she’ll lie to mollify him. “No,” she says, squeezing his hand. “That’s why you’re here - to tell me about it.”
He buys a ring and proposes to her at the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Her wedding bouquet would have made a beautiful painting.
When his mother dies, Rowan moves heaven and earth to get her a wreath of sunflowers. They weren’t her favourite flowers, but it seems right somehow. Hers is not a death that should be mourned, lamenting the things that could have been, but a life to celebrated. She lived it magnificently, even if he says so himself.
That night when the museum closes to the public, Rowan stands for a while in front of that same self-portrait whose dark eyes he fell in love with all those years ago until his legs are too tired to hold him up and sits cross-legged on the floor like the children in the school groups that come in.
For the first time since he was a young he allowed himself to really wonder what could have happened had someone been able to help him - really help him. Would he have lived longer? Would he have continued to paint, and if he had what would those works be like?
He also wonders, selfishly, if Van Gogh’s work would have been so powerful, so starkly beautiful.
He thinks of that strangely frail, worn red-haired man who looked as though he was paying the price for living vibrantly, moved to tears by the people looking, admiring the pictures, by Dr Black’s inadequate hundred word summary of how Vincent Van Gogh changed the world.
As the colours in the painting blur together, he realises he’s weeping. He’s not entirely sure why.
A/N: The Potato Eaters was painted before Van Gogh began to really pursue painting - at the time he was studying theology and worked as a missionary.