Professor Butter Beard and Vincent’s “Garden at Arles”
“Starry, starry night. Flaming flowers that brightly blaze. Swirling clouds in violet haze reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue.
Colors changing hue. Morning fields of amber grain. Weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.
Now, I understand what you tried to say to me. How you suffered for your sanity. How you tried to set them free. They would not listen. They did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.”
- Don McLean, songwriter
Oh Vincent! They are listening now.
I have a soulful connection with this extraordinary artist that I can’t define. I understand his swirling way of seeing the world, his ability to furiously sculpt paint, and his personal passions that so deftly travel from his dreams onto the canvas. Maybe it is ginger to ginger. Or, writer to writer. May I boldly say artist to artist? Our artistic mediums differ, but somehow, I find our souls are karmically bound.
The Metropolitan Museum just opened their latest exhibition this weekend – “Van Gogh’s Cypresses.” It is the first exhibition to focus on the trees, undoubtably among the most famous in the history of art, eternalized in signature images by Vincent van Gogh. The exhibition includes such iconic pictures as “Wheat Field with Cypresses” and “The Starry Night.” The forty collected works of art (and letters) illuminate the extent of the artist’s fascination with the region’s distinctive flamelike evergreens as they successively sparked, fueled, and stoked his imagination over the course of two years in the South of France.
Susan Alyson Stein writes, “Van Gogh spent a little more than two years in the South of France, registering his inspired response to the limpid light and novelty of the landscape in works that took shape in successive series, painted in sunstruck hues with robust brushwork that kept pace with short-lived seasons and long-ranging goals.” Within the series, he targeted three main motifs: cypresses, olive trees, and mountains. He wrote to his brother Theo: “The cypresses still preoccupy me… because it astonishes me that no one has yet done them as I see them.” This I understand.
And then he discovered the gardens. During the height of the summer of 1888, Van Gogh took notice of the “black cypresses” that crisscrossed the countryside acting as windbreakers protecting the whitewashed country cottages and their floral farmhouse gardens. It began with a large scale reed pen and ink over graphite drawing recording the dazzling sight of a “garden full of flowers.” He then revisited the scene in oil paint using the same robust variety of strokes as the drawing – short, long, tented, curved, straight and squiggly – all perfectly capturing the dancing rainbow of colors shimmering before him.
He did his best to inventory the vision in another letter to Theo: “Poppies and other red flowers in green in the foreground, then a patch of bluebells. Then a patch of orange and yellow African marigolds, then white and yellow flowers and finally, in the background, pink and lilac and also scabious, dark violet, and red geraniums and sunflowers and a fig tree and oleander and a vine. At the end, black cypresses against little low white houses with orange roofs – and a delicate green-blue strip of sky.”
Vincent, it is the garden of our dreams. This morning, I translated our shared vision into buttery-crisp cookies as “good morning gifts” to my farmer friends at their market. I warmed these bursts of sunshine with bold helpings of both fresh and dried ginger and kept them sparkling bright with the addition of orange zest. And then, to imitate your rainbow collection of floral colors, I added generous playfulness in the form of multi-colored mini M&M chocolate candies.
I imagine Vincent and I walking the worn paths between the cypresses as the morning light seeps through the overnight misty haze. He reluctantly offers me a sip of his muddy coffee in a cracked mug, and I return the gesture by offering a couple of freshly baked butter cookies. The crumbs tumble from his ginger beard to his linen blue smock, and I nonchalantly brush them away before they mingle with his expensive oil paints. We sit and enjoy a full conversation without uttering a word. I understand what you say to me. I have learned how.
Vincent’s Garden Cookies
Six dozen cookies
3 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp baking soda
2 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp fine sea salt
12 ounces (24 Tbsp) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 ½ cup granulated sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar
Zest of one large orange
One 1” knob of fresh ginger, peeled and grated
2 tsp vanilla paste
3 large eggs, room temperature
2 cups mini M&M chocolate candies
1) In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt and ground ginger. Set aside.
2) Preheat your oven to 375 degrees and line your baking sheets with parchment paper.
3) In a standing mixer, mix together the two sugars, orange zest and grated ginger. Add the butter and cream until light and fluffy (about 3-4 minutes). Add the vanilla paste and mix to evenly distribute. Add the eggs, one at a time, and mix on low until to evenly distribute. Make sure to scrape the sides a couple of times to evenly mix in the butter.
4) Turn off the mixer and add the dry ingredients. Turn the mixer on low and just mix until the dough comes together.
5) Remove the bowl from the mixer and fold in the mini M&M chocolate candies.
6) Use a 1 Tbsp scoop to portion the dough, placing no more than one dozen dough balls on each baking sheet. Bake for six minutes, rotate the pan, and bake for another five minutes until the edges are just beginning to brown and the tops have a golden hue.
7) Let the cookies cool on the pans for five minutes and then remove them to a wire rack to cool completely (if you can wait that long!)
