Van Gogh's Footnotes

PWtalks with Alyson Richman

by Jonathan Segura -- Publishers Weekly, 8/14/2006

Richman's third novel, The Last Van Gogh (Reviews, Aug. 7), is less about the painter than his effects on a country doctor's cloistered family.

Your first novel (The Mark Carver's Son) is set in historic Japan. Your second novel (Swedish Tango) takes place in mid-century Chile, Finland and Sweden. And now you're in 19th-century rural France.

I'm attracted to stories in which the characters are placed in foreign settings. I grew up in a small town on Long Island, and when I was 16, my family moved to Tokyo. That experience had a profound effect on me. I was this American living in Japan and was visibly different.

Not unlike, say, a certain absinthe-chugging, one-eared Dutch painter who lived and worked in France.

Van Gogh is Dutch; he's painting in France. He's struggling to be an artist. He's ill and still trying to do his life calling. My time abroad gave me a fascination about what happens when someone is put in a different landscape.

But it's pretty well known what happened to Van Gogh, right?

Where I let my imagination run is with the characters who weren't so well documented, such as with Dr. Gachet's supposed illegitimate child. All we knew about her is she was born to a mother who was supposedly a laundress. Her father wasn't named on her birth certificate. No art historical text mentions her. She's just a footnote.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on a new novel that's going to deal with [painter] Egon Schiele and a painting that a Jewish family lost during the war.

I'm picking up on an "artist" theme here.

Well, I always wanted to be a painter myself. When I was applying to college, I applied to almost exclusively art schools. At the last minute, I panicked and thought maybe I don't want to be an artist for the rest of my life. But it's probably me mourning that I don't paint anymore. I love it so much. I can easily place myself in the shoes of a character who is an artist.

You're never tempted to run down to Dick Blick and pick up some paints?

Since I've had children, it's impossible. I can either write or paint, so I'm trying to write and raise a family. There's always finger-painting, I guess.