VanGogh 2

View of Arles with Irises in the Foreground

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VanGogh-View_of_Arles_with_Irises.jpg

But the landscapes!
"Like Cezanne he dreamed of painting the world's virginity."
His emblematic irises dividing a field of buttercups
And behind the fig trees a glimpse of the red tiled roofs and towers.
He is jubilant in Arles: "That sea of yellow
With the band of violet irises and in the background that
Coquettish little town of pretty women!"
Motion and emotion dominate yet human misery is absent.
He paints with brush using the technique of pen, ink and pencil:
The first colors are organized,
The petals of purple iris individual with deep reds and blues
Outlined in a smile of luminous joy.
The buttercups become a mass of yellow dots, gold and brown
In front and behind.
The trees branch the leaves up and up to
The topography of painted sky.
It's a painting of diagonals of happiness;
An Ode to life.

VanGogh 1

What did he feel while he painted? He wrote that "in a picture I want to say something comforting as music is comforting." We have his rolling clouds, winding cypresses and sunflowers; his visions of used shoes.  Painting is a dirty and difficult occupation, he said.

A Pair of Shoes

Those shoes seem to have tramped hard
Through muddied trails and graveled paths.
The untied leather laces wind
Like used wire.
In front on the scuffed toe
Lines calculate the miles traveled.
The tongue leans over the side,
Stiff but bending in an obstinate crease.
Beside, its partner flops heel up
Hobnails white against the sole
Worn to an oddly-shaped display:
An engraving of intimate obscurity that
Keeps the secrets of the trudged paths.
The rootless traveler, weary,
Drops these companions of his wanderings
On a blue rough surface.
He does what has become natural:
Brushes oil on canvas.
Old worn shoes--the model of his life.
But what did he feel while he painted?
He claimed that we wanted to convey
"Les petites miseres de la vie humanie."
A compassionate painting?
A compassionate man?
Shoes seen without illusion,
A still life of fanatic fidelity
To human pain.

http://www.artquotes.net/masters/vangogh/vangogh_shoes1887.jpg

A Rubaiyat

Shall I make for you an omelet
Of lark's eggs and truffles
Here in our garden of eden?
Shall we use as our table the moss-covered rock

In the glade, in the shade of the oak?
Shall we drink mellow wine
From the pink goblet shells
With the rose reflections of dew?

And shall you play on your lute
While I dance all around you
Twirling on grass-covered meadows?
Shall we sit in the sun

And dream of our laughter
To come in these days of enchantment?
And shall we be happy forever and always
In this chamber, our garden of love?

Original Sin

Cointreau glazing the sides of a crystal glass--
Bitter orange was the fruit of desire
That deceived the mother of mankind.
The pungent liquid rind
Coiled to the glass bottom:
The clear melting fire kissed her lips,
Burnt her tongue
And consumed the heart of Eve.