Love makes one calmer about many things and that way, one is more fit for one's work.
--Vincent van Gogh
I majored in Art in college and last summer's visit to MoMA in NYC was my art history class come to life. Oldenberg. Pollack. Warhol. Rauschenberg. A bazillion others.
Starry Night!
NOT!
That van Gogh masterpiece has long been a favorite of my hero's too...despite his non-art major, so we ran in near delirium throughout the museum looking for it. Finally we had to ask a docent. Tragically, the painting is off-display temporarily.
Sigh.
In a letter to his brother Theo, he wrote, "This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star* which looked very big." Painted in the Asylum in St-Remy in 1889, Vincent added the village to the remembered scene, the spire apparently invoking his native Netherlands.
How perfect to have created something so perfect? Even if I do see the scene on placemats and cloth bookbags and other mundane things.
Perhaps Don McLean said it best in his classic unforgettable song.
The world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.
(*Venus)
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