Starry Night



 

 

I saw Van Gogh's "Starry Night" at the NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art.  It's a cool painting, and really does capture one of those nights where the sky is a deep shade of cobalt lit up by bright skies.  The painting shows a perspective from outside of the city, which even in 1889 may have had enough indoor lighting spilling into the night through windows to require an observer of the stars to head outside of the city a bit to really do so.  This painting is probably more famous in today's pop culture, but he painted a similar one in 1888 of the skies and house lights reflecting off the Rhone River.

 

 

I like to think about how these paintings would have been considered by those who viewed them in 1888 or 1889.  In that now unimaginable time when access was limited -- there were no color photographs and would not be for 50 years, and it would be 115 years until my beloved internet allowed me to just pull it up online.  Had I lived in 1890, would I have possibly heard word of a new beautiful painting (obviously at some ball involving hoop skirts, although presumably I would still have been a terrible dancer)?  Only if I were lucky could I have seen it, for it was owned privately by different parties until 1906.  But human taste remains the same in some instances, this being one.  It is still alluring to look at the original 126 years later, and humans still look up into the same clear night sky when Venus and a quarter moon hold court.  I am still drawn to painting of light in darkness, and still feel my gaze drawn upwards on a starry night.  Which brings me to the point -- Saskatchewan has not much urban space, and therefore one sees a lot of stars in the sky.

 

so many stars

 

Starry night 2014....not exactly a masterpiece, but....

There was a streetlight that shone in my window in Bermuda, and I could never quite get the room dark enough.  I was looking forward to inky black darkness in the country...but to my surprise, some nights the cumulative effect of the stars and the moon are worse than that streetlight.  The nights here can be totally black if cloudy, but very bright when clear.  Maybe not overly exciting, but, timeless.  And when you have a bad day and feel very small, staring up into all those stars reminds you that comparatively, everything is very small...and somehow that makes it better.