Jeanne Braun (writing about Marilynn's Class on Impressionist Art):
"…Van Gogh’s self-portrait was projected on one of the walls. He was young when he died, Marilynn said, but during his lifetime he was one of the most prolific artists in the world.
"Isn’t he the guy that cut off his ear?" asked someone.
"Yes he did." replied Marilynn.
"Did he die when he cut off his ear?
"Cutting off your ear won’t kill you," Marilynn smiled," but it will hurt a little bit."
"How old was he when he died?" piped up someone else.
Marilynn didn’t know off-hand, so she walked over to the blackboard and chalked up the date of Van Gogh’s death. Beneath that she wrote the date of his birth.
Until that point, I had always thought of every subject separately. Writing was writing, math was math, drawing was drawing. Drawing was not math. But as Marilynn subtracted Van Gogh’s birth date from his death date, things suddenly looked different. Math and drawing, I realized, were overlapping. Was that legal? Was that how it was supposed to work? Did different subjects touch each other? I was very confused.
…The long and short of it is, no one thing is isolated from every other thing…the first time I spotted the connection, I was too thrown off by the experience to notice how old Van Gogh actually was when he died."
