Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Starry Night, by Vin­cent Van Gogh. 1889. Museum of Mod­ern Art, NYC.

There have been thou­sands of inter­pre­ta­tions of Van Gogh’s most famous paint­ing. Some find com­fort in reduc­tion. Reduced to a mere fig­ment of his infected brain, reduced to a paint­ing of scenery out­side his asy­lum in Saint Remy, reduced to some­thing your kid sis­ter could do. Reduced.

Thing is, the most impor­tant thing, this is a paint­ing of a world with­out end, a mil­lion worlds with­out begin­ning or end that fight against reduc­tion to the death. Or, if there is a begin­ning, it is the first of all firsts, the Big Bang and the rem­nants of that explo­sion as they appeared to one lone genius of the heart, bil­lions of years later.

Van Gogh looked out of his win­dow in Saint Remy, the “real” frame and the one of metaphor, mem­ory and sym­bol. Noth­ing could con­tain his vision, noth­ing could bring the Nether­lands and France wholly together, not the can­vas, the col­ors, the brush work or his eyes. Though he must have tried aggres­sively, pas­sion­ately to pin it all down, never sat­is­fied with the final results …

* * * * *

Pas­cal, in his immor­tal Pensees said:

The eter­nal silence of these infi­nite spaces fright­ens me.

And Spin­oza said, as if answer­ing Pas­cal, buck­ing him up for a moment:

And such things as affect the ear are called noises, and form dis­cord or har­mony, the last of which has delighted men to mad­ness, so that they have believed that har­mony delights God. Nor have there been want­ing philoso­phers who assert that the move­ments of the heav­enly spheres com­pose harmony.

And Galileo said, as if answer­ing both of them:

The Sun, with all the plan­ets revolv­ing around it, and depend­ing on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had noth­ing else in the Uni­verse to do.

* * * * *

A con­stant prob­lem for artists: Pro­ject­ing an expan­sive vision of things on a very small plane, bil­lions of metaphor­i­cal miles away from the heart of that vision, con­sumed by it, engulfed by it, sep­a­rated from it for­ever. The great­est art and artists show us what lies beyond that frame. Push us to keep going beyond our­selves and what­ever is imme­di­ately in front of us.

The Swirls. I love the swirls. I paint those swirls. I made them my own. Oceans unleashed are the skies, before and after.