What If Van Gogh Painted Us — and Our Screens?

I watched a guy at a bar talking to himself the other night — gesturing, laughing, deep in it. Then I saw the earbud. He was on a call with someone far away.

I couldn’t stop thinking about how that scene would look to someone from a hundred years ago. A man alone, lit by a little glowing thing, talking to no one you can see. It would look like madness. Up close, it was just love — a guy laughing with someone he misses.

So I tried something. I imagined Vincent van Gogh could sit in today’s cafés and bars and paint us the way he painted his own night owls — the absinthe drinkers, the café regulars, the people sitting alone together under the new light of their age. I ran the images myself, one at a time, and a few of them surprised me into seeing something I hadn’t. Here’s the series, and what it taught me.

The Man Who Talks to Himself — after The Night Café, 1888. What looks like madness across the room is, up close, a call with his brother.

Here’s the thing that keeps nagging me: he already painted this. Van Gogh’s night café, his café terrace, his absinthe drinker — they’re all rooms full of people sitting alone together, lit by the brand-new artificial light of the 1880s. Gaslight was a technology then. It was the thing that let people gather in public after dark, and it changed what a face looked like. Gaslight was the screen-glow of its century.

And he wasn’t a man hiding from the modern world. He chased its new light on purpose — genuinely thrilled you could paint the night at all now, without using black. He reached for the century’s new industrial paint, that blazing chrome yellow. He retrained his eye on Japanese prints that only reached him because trade had gone global. In the language we’d use today, Van Gogh was an early adopter.

So the first few came easy — the tender ones he’d have found on any given night.

The Heartbroken Expression of Our Time — after Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 1890. A telehealth nurse ends her shift; a charger cable rests where the sprig of foxglove used to lie.

Van Gogh said he wanted the Gachet portrait to hold “the heartbroken expression of our time.” Turns out our time has one too, and she’s a nurse, still awake at the end of a long shift, carrying the day’s last patient home behind her eyes.

But the paintings that actually surprised me weren’t the phones at all. It was the tech he’d have had no words for — the stuff there’s no nineteenth-century rhyme for.

The Confession to the Air — no phone. He’s talking to something that answers.

The Driverless Carriage — no hand on the wheel. The sensor-ring glows like a halo.

A man leaning in to talk to a glowing speaker on the table — no phone anywhere, just a person in real conversation with something that answers back. A carriage rolling down the lane with nobody driving it, a little ring of light turning on its roof right where I’d swear a halo goes.

The Sower and the Machine — after The Sower, 1888. The oldest work and the newest tool, side by side in the gold.

And then the one I keep coming back to. Van Gogh’s sower, flinging seed by hand against that enormous sun — and rolling along the same furrows, a little robot doing the same work. The oldest human labor and the newest machine, sharing a field at sunset. Nobody in that picture is afraid of anybody.

Somewhere in the middle of making these, the whole series flipped on me. I’d set out to paint people looking at machines. I ended up painting machines that had quietly moved in and become part of the family.

The Café Regular — now the machine is the one sitting alone together.

The Iron Dog — a robot trots home at the farmer’s heel. The oldest bond, the newest machine.

The Night Delivery — a messenger drops a parcel out of the swirling sky.

An android sitting by itself with a coffee, looking for all the world like the loneliest regular in the place. A robot dog trotting home at an old farmer’s heel. A drone lowering a package to a lit doorway under a Starry Night sky, like some small mechanical angel. I didn’t plan for any of them to be tender. They just came out that way.

That’s the part I didn’t expect. I went in half-braced for these to feel cold — the dystopia everyone keeps promising. They came out warm. Not because I told them to, but because the moment you drop a machine into Van Gogh’s world, his whole way of seeing does the rest. It insists on finding the person, or the feeling, in whatever happens to be under the light.

Self-Portrait in a Dark Screen — after the self-portraits. The screen is off; the reflection remains.

I put myself in the last one, the way he was always his own most available model — couldn’t afford to hire anyone, so he painted himself. It’s just my reflection in a sleeping laptop, brush in hand. The screen is off. The person is still there.

I don’t have a grand conclusion. Mostly I have the guy at the bar, still laughing at nothing, still not alone. Van Gogh spent his life chasing a particular light and painting whoever it fell on. The light in our cafés changed. The people under it didn’t.

Same light he was chasing. Different lamp.

— Joe