mastery out of despair

i've been reading about the troubled life of vincent van gogh, mainly during the time of his mental breakdown and stay at the saint remy asylum. i was telling some friends about it last night, how when he arrived he became particularly obsessed with a cypress tree on the remy grounds. van gogh writes about the tree in a letter to his brother that i find incredibly insightful and beautiful:


"The tree is as beautiful of line and proportion as an Egyptian obelisk. And the green has a quality of such distinction. It is a splash of black in a sunny landscape, but it is one of the most interesting black notes, and the most difficult to hit off exactly that I can imagine...now the nearest tree is an enormous trunk... but one side branch shoots up very high and lets fall an avalanche of dark green pine needle. This somber giant-- like a defeated proud man-- contrasts, when considered in the nature of a living creature, with the pale smile of a last rose on the fading bush in front of him. Underneath the trees, empty stone benched, sullen box trees; the sky is mirrored-- yellow-- in a puddle left by the rain. A sunbeam, the last ray of daylight, raises the somber ocher almost to orange. Here and there small figures wander around among the tree trunks." from the World of Van Gogh by Robert Wallace

posted by *g* @ 9:39 AM