Darkness and Light Day Eight

Despite the stereotype of his being a tortured artist and all the mental anguish and depression he experienced, van Gogh never ceased to enjoy an astonishingly clear self-awareness and consciousness of what he was doing.

He lived at night. He didn’t sleep until three or four in the morning. He wrote, read, drank, went to see friends, spent entire nights in cafés …or meditated over the very rich associations that he saw in the night. It was during the night hours that his experiments with imagination and memory went the farthest. 

“Imagination …..enables us to create a more exalted and consoling nature than what just a glance at reality…allows us to receive...... a starry sky for example is a thing I would like to do” A year later (1888)  he made The Starry Night over the Rhone” 

My soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you. For when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness. (Isaiah 26:9) 

He who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name (Amos 5:8)

Van Gogh in a letter to his sister Wil, written in 1888 as he was painting his first starry night canvas. He was inspired, he said, by imagery in the poems by Walt Whitman he was reading: “He sees…under the great starlit vault of heaven a something which after all one can only call God—and eternity in its place above the world.” 

When I consider your heavens,
    the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
    which you have set in place,
what must humans be that you are mindful of them,
    human beings that you care for them

                                                         Psalm 8;3,4

When van Gogh he looked at the night sky, he wrote to Theo in August 1888, he saw “the mysterious brightness of a pale star in the infinite.” …. to feel the stars and the infinite high and clear above you. Then life is almost enchanted after all.”

Information and quotes sourced from a wonderful article from the Smithsonian about van Gogh’s night paintings, which can be found here.

(In 2011 the idea of van Gogh taking his own life has been challenged. The hypothesis in the book, Van Gogh, the Life, by Stephen Naifeh and Gregory White Smith is far more consistent with van Gogh’s values and his deep even if unconventional faith. I won’t say anymore here, but you can read the book, or watch the beautiful film Loving Vincent.) 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Image - Starry Night Over The Rhone by Vincent Van Gough, Public Domain, taken from here