HOWARD NEUFELD, artist

My Conversion Experience: a spiritual epiphany

It was during Spring Quarter my freshman year at Bethel College in 1963 when I had I guess what you might call a spiritual epiphany, the first and only spiritual experience of my life. It was life changing; what I felt was absolute and crystal clear and certainly something my nineteen years had not seen coming.

There was a class that was taking a field trip to the Nelson Museum of Art in Kansas City to see an exhibition of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. I think this was the first time they were brought to the U.S. from Holland and his (Vincent's) nephew, V.W. Van Gogh had selected work from the family's collection.

I'm not sure if I was actually taking the class or just invited. Anyway, the students had to car-pool and with my folks having a big station wagon, I volunteered to drive. After entering the Museum I remember each painting captured my deepest attention as I worked my way around the different galleries, witnessing the different moments in Vincent's life that reflected this person as an artist, a painter. To this day, I cannot put into words my experience, only that I profoundly felt a kind of spiritual clarity; that this was who I am - what I was to become  - that is, to do with my life. I remember being particularly moved by the large painting of "The Potato Eaters." I'm sure my Mennonite heritage with its tradition of service to the poor and the sick was, no doubt, a factor in my experience of this particular painting and the many smaller paintings and drawings of these people.

At some point in my very private journey through the different rooms, an elderly man came up behind me. He told me he had been watching me as I moved along the walls of the Museum and couldn't help but see my being lost in space and time with each painting - he could see the depth of my experience with each work. He told me that he was Vincent's nephew who had brought some of his uncle's work to the Museum. All I can recall saying to him was that I had never had such an experience in my entire life and that I felt that I knew, that I should become a painter. I've always called this my "conversion experience." 

I still keep the small catalog of words and images from the exhibition in a special place in my bookshelf, to browse through whenever I feel the "dreaded doubt."