Two photographs are particularly dear to me. The view from the hotel rooftop, with the roofs and a band of light beneath the clouds, and a panel displaying a reproduction of one of his self-portraits against a stone wall.
In the landscape, I recognise a moment from the journey. In the self-portrait, something that makes me pause.
Visiting those places made me think about how readily we regard with suspicion people who perceive the world differently from us. When we do not understand a way of expressing oneself, an intuition or a sensibility, we may be tempted to give it a label. It is easier than taking the time to understand.
In accounts of Van Gogh’s life, genius is often associated with “madness”. That association leaves me uneasy. A person’s suffering deserves respect and cannot become a convenient explanation for their creativity. I wonder, instead, how able we are to recognise the value of a perspective when it is still far from what we know how to appreciate.
Today, we travel to visit those places and look for traces of his presence. Standing before that self-portrait, I thought about how difficult it can be to welcome a different vision before time makes it recognisable, before someone teaches us to regard it as important.
This question also concerns me in my work.
In my Scent Identity Design work, attention to individual perception is fundamental. A scent can evoke very different memories. What feels familiar to me may seem foreign to someone else; a pleasant sensation may recall an experience I know nothing about for the person in front of me.
To understand it, I have to listen. If I begin only with my own interpretation, I risk missing precisely what makes that response interesting.
When designing an identity for a brand, too, there is a moment when we need to leave room for things that do not immediately lend themselves to a definition. An unexpected association, a memory or a perception that is difficult to describe can help us understand something a more immediate reading would have overlooked.
The journey to Provence brought me back to this willingness to listen. It made me think about the people we meet and how quickly we sometimes decide that we have understood them.
Being different does not necessarily mean being right. But distance from our own way of seeing is not, in itself, a good reason to stop listening.
I bring home the memory of time spent with my family and these two images. I hope they will remind me, when a perspective unsettles me, to give it a little more attention.