The Mulberry Tree by Vincent van Gogh is one of the artist’s personal favorites, and it’s no mystery why.

This tree is fuggin’ awesome for many reasons, the first of which being that it looks like it’s on fire. Burning bush reference, perchance? Secondly, the paint is so thick that the artist ended up using the handle end of his paint brush, making him more of a sculptor than a painter and The Mulberry Tree more of a low-relief sculpture than a painting. Thirdly, this painting was done less than a year before van Gogh killed himself. Ok, that was definitely less awesome but the awesome part of that is this painting probably wasn’t even completely dry when van Gogh died. His works usually took a year to eighteen months to completely dry, which, if you think about it, is bananas because he averaged 100 paintings per year. Imagine how stressful it would be to constantly be surrounded by wet paint. All of a sudden it makes sense that he went crazy.

To give a little context for this work, van Gogh had just checked himself into a mental hospital in Saint-Remy in the south of France after the whole ear debacle. He wrote to his brother about all of the art he’d been making mentioning a tree whose “dense foliage was of a magnificent yellow color against a very blue sky on a white stoney field with the sunshine from behind.” Obviously he was talking about this beaut. Only van Gogh could make just a little old mulberry tree, this ridiculously cool.