!! I publish this episode earlier, because I am in the nightshift !!
Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,
First of all I love to thank you all for your positive reactions on the "orphanage-project" by Leslie and I am looking forward to all of your contributions for that project. You can email your contribution to the emailaddress I have given in that CD-Extra episode (2015-5). (
carpediemhaikukai2015orphanage@gmail.com)
Ok ... let us do some haiku-ing. Today I have chosen for a beautiful painting by my fellow Dutchman Vincent Van Gogh, he was a post-impressionist, but in his paintings the base of impressionism you can see. He had a wonderful eye for little details, as we have as haiku poets. This painting which I have chosen is known as
Starry Night.
A while ago I remember that I responded on a theme at Magpie Tales with the same prompt Starry Night (that response you can find HERE at my personal weblog).
And as I was doing research for this episode I ran into a few nice haiku which I love to share here with you all.
one by one
fireflies escape my glass jar...
starry night
The calm midnight sky
Deep in the mind of van gogh
I will sit and stare
(c) John Carter
Another nice haiku written by "Ercan" of Poetry Portfolio, a collective of poets:
In the
starry night
Swirling blue clouds in the sky
As the tree rise high
© Ercan
I love to tell you all a little bit more about the history behind this wonderful painting. At that time Van Gogh was institutionalized in Saint-Paul-de-Mausole lunatic asylum. In that time he painted a lot of paintings.
Although
The Starry Night was painted during the day in Van Gogh's ground-floor studio,
it would be inaccurate to state that the picture was painted from memory. The
view has been identified as the one from his bedroom window, facing east, a
view which Van Gogh painted variations of no fewer than twenty-one times,
including The Starry Night. "Through the iron-barred window," he
wrote to his brother, Theo, around 23 May 1889, "I can see an enclosed
square of wheat . . . above which, in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all
its glory."
Van Gogh
depicted the view at different times of day and under various weather
conditions, including sunrise, moonrise, sunshine-filled days, overcast days,
windy days, and one day with rain. The hospital staff did not allow Van Gogh to
paint in his bedroom, but he was able to make sketches in ink or charcoal on
paper, and eventually he would base newer variations on previous versions. The
pictorial element uniting all of these paintings is the diagonal line coming in
from the right depicting the low rolling hills of the Alpilles mountains. In
fifteen of the twenty-one versions, cypress trees are visible beyond the far
wall enclosing the wheat field. Van Gogh telescoped the view in six of these
paintings, most notably in Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night,
bringing the trees closer to the picture plane.
One of the
first paintings of the view was Mountainous Landscape Behind Saint-Rémy, now in
Copenhagen, which Van Gogh identified in a letter to his sister Wil from 16
June 1889 as hanging in his studio to dry. Two days later, he wrote to his
brother that he had painted "a starry sky." The Starry Night is the
only nocturne painting in the series of views from his bedroom window. In early
June Vincent wrote to Theo, "This morning I saw the countryside from my
window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which
looked very big." Two scholars working independently of each other have
determined that Venus was indeed visible in Provence in the spring of 1889. So
the brightest "star" in the painting, just to the viewer's right of
the cypress tree, is actually Venus.
The moon is
stylized, as astronomical records indicate that the moon was waning gibbous at
the time Van Gogh painted the picture. Even if the phase of the moon had been a
waning crescent at the time, Van Gogh's moon is not astronomically correct. The
one pictorial element that was definitely not visible from Van Gogh's cell is
the village, which is based on a sketch made from a hillside above the village
of Saint-Rémy.
I love this story and I can almost feel and see the despair in his life, trying to become healthy again after his nervous breakdown (the time in which he cut of his ear) seeking the beauty of the night or the late evening. How lonely he must have felt than ...
This however has given him the strenght and inspiration to paint this gorgeous Starry Night.
from the asylum
he observed the starry night -
seeking for the light
(c) Chèvrefeuille
And now it is up to you my dear Haijin. This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and it will remain open until February 8th at noon (CET). I will (try to) publish our next episode, a new episode of our Time Machine feature, Blue, later on. For now ... have fun, be inspired and share.
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