Oleander

The prompt was to choose a piece of art and write about what it evokes. It was accompanied by the painting Oleander, by Vincent Van Gogh.

A woman in a tightly cinched shirtwaist dress prepares a martini for her husband at a campsite. With the shiny Airstream behind her and martini shaker in the foreground, she is somehow steady-footed in her kitten heels. She takes an oleander leaf, breaks it in half, and adds it to the ingredients. 

The husband dies.

Oleanders mainly evoke long car trips with my parents in the navy blue 1965 Oldsmobile Cutlass. No air conditioning, windows opening, listening to the baseball broadcast on the radio and wondering why the oleanders in the median, pink, white and red, have no rhythm to the planting pattern. I’ve come to appreciate them over the years and would like some of my own to plant in the barren island that divides us from the neighbors. Plumbago has largely taken over the role of oleander these days, brightening with a slightly dusty blue and thrusting itself unreservedly up hillsides along the freeway. It is no oleander.

Vincent Van Gogh’s Oleanders is a rare painting of his that I like. The composition is delicious, accentuating the counterpoint of the flower to the leaf, using the leaves separately to direct the eye and give shape. It is not this way in nature. In this way it is two works of art, the arrangement and the painting itself.

Update: Oleander in the wild (or at least in the back of the storage facility).

PS

My three favorite parts of the Van Gogh Museum:

1) The artist’s paints and palettes

2) An exhibit dedicated to his use of new pigments to achieve certain looks (and how those pigments have faded)

3) A gallery that showed the works of his schoolmates

PPS I lost the name of the movie where the woman kills her husband...