Starry Night

For this activity, you will analyze a poem or song in tandem with Starry Night, Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting. Each group will have their own poem or song and will be responsible for developing a thesis to fit their analysis. Focus on the similarities between the words of the poem and the visuals in the painting. Have any images in the painting inspired certain parts of the poem? What image/color in the painting struck the author of the poem/song? What first strikes each student? Has the author altered anything in the painting? What details are lost or added in these “translations”? Do these textual “translations” convey a different meaning or evoke another emotion?

After you’ve discussed the questions above, write a paragraph and thesis together to share with the class. Remember to keep the following in mind when crafting your thesis:

• ·         An aspect of the painting/poem/song that is meaningful to your group
• ·         Developing a thoughtful stance
• ·         Anticipate a “so what” question

Post it to one blog and email me the link and your group number. Hopefully, we will have enough time in class to present and discuss our analyses as a whole.

1.       1. The Starry Night by Anne Sexton

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist

except where one black-haired tree slips

up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.

The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.  

Oh starry starry night! This is how

I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.

Even the moon bulges in its orange irons  

to push children, like a god, from its eye.

The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.  

Oh starry starry night! This is how  

I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,  

sucked up by that great dragon, to split  

from my life with no flag,

no belly,

no cry.

2.      2.  Starry Night by Tupac Shakur (poem)

A creative heart, obsessed with satisfying

this dormant and uncaring society

you have given them the stars at night

and you have given them

Bountiful Bouquets of Sunflowers

but 4 u there is only contempt

and though you pour yourself into that fame

and present it so proudly this world

could not accept your masterpieces

from the heart.

So on that starry night you gave to us

and you took away from us

the one thing we never acknowledged

your life.

3.      

3.        3. “Vincent (Starry Starry Night)” by Don Mclean (song)

Starry, starry night

Paint your palette blue and gray

Look out on a summer's day

With eyes that know the darkness in my soul

Shadows on the hills

Sketch the trees and the daffodils

Catch the breeze and the winter chills

In colors on the snowy linen land

Now I understand

What you tried to say to me

And how you suffered for your sanity

And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they did not know how

Perhaps they'll listen now

Starry, starry night

Flaming flowers that brightly blaze

Swirling clouds in violet haze

Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue

Colors changing hue

Morning fields of amber grain

Weathered faces lined in pain

Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand

Now I understand

What you tried to say to me

And how you suffered for your sanity

And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they did not know how

Perhaps they'll listen now

For they could not love you

But still your love was true

And when no hope was left in sight

On that starry, starry night

You took your life, as lovers often do

But I could've told you Vincent

This world was never meant for

One as beautiful as you

Starry, starry night

Portraits hung in empty halls

Frame-less heads on nameless walls

With eyes that watch the world and can't forget

Like the strangers that you've met

The ragged men in ragged clothes

The silver thorn of bloody rose

Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow

Now I think I know

What you tried to say to me

And how you suffered for your sanity

And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they're not listening still

Perhaps they never will

4.      4.  "The Starry Night" by Robert Fagles

Long as I paint

I feel myself

less mad

the brush in my hand

a lightning rod to madness

But never ground that madness

execute it ride the lightning up

from these benighted streets and steeple up

with the cypress look its black is burning green

I am that I am it cries

it lifts me up the nightfall up

the cloudrack coiling like a dragon's flanks

a third of the stars in heaven wheeling in its wake

wheels in wheels around the moon that cradles round the sun

and if I can only trail these whirling eternal stars

with one sweep of the brush like Michael's sword if I can

cut the life out of the beast - safeguard the mother and the son

all heaven will hymn in conflagration blazing down

the night the mountain ranges down

the claustrophobic valleys of the mad

Madness

is what I have instead of heaven

God deliver me - help me now deliver

all this frenzy back into your hands

our brushstrokes burning clearer into dawn.

5.      5.  From “Van Gogh in Moods, Both Dark and Light” by Benjamin Genocchio (art review)

The cypresses stand tall and unbudgeable in the blustery wind as, perhaps, a symbol of strength and fortitude.

The sky, by contrast, is speckled and swirling. Clouds spiral and whorl, or twist into tight knots, rising up from behind a mountain range that slopes gently downward to where it joins the land. Foul weather is on the way.

An explosion of wheat grass, golden and yellow, carpets the foreground of the painting. The grass leaps high into the air like flames, mimicking the elegant, vertical, slender shape of the cypresses.

This work, “Cypresses,” by Vincent van Gogh, was painted in June 1889 during his confinement at the asylum in Saint-Rémy in the south of France. Until September it will be hanging at the Yale University Art Gallery, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as part of a two-work show organized by Jennifer Gross, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art.

The other painting is van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Also painted in June 1889, it provides a very different view of the southern French countryside.

Perspective is the most obvious difference between them. The cropping and closeness of “Cypresses” convey an immediacy and almost tactile relationship to nature, immersing you there in the grasses beneath the grinding sun. “The Starry Night,” by contrast, is painted from up high, the town off in the distance and possibly observed from the artist’s window at the asylum. You get a feeling of detachment.

…

Then there is that incredible sky in “The Starry Night.” The moon and stars are balls of orange-yellow light verging on the radioactive. Meanwhile, the clouds have begun to coil, twist or whirl into atmospheric surf. An unearthly glow confers a further intensity to the picture. It is manic and tripped-out.

All this neatly equates with the madman of legend. But the idea that van Gogh’s paintings are the expression of his illness and thus somehow “mad” is so wrong-headed that it requires immediate refutation. It was van Gogh’s illness that stopped him from painting. His paintings are the product of his moments of lucidity, his efforts to stay in touch with reality. They couldn’t be saner.

In both paintings there is ample evidence of the artist’s concision, exactness of judgment and remarkable powers of visual analysis. And how brilliantly he assimilates color opposites, mixing together hot colors like orange, yellow and red with cold whites and blues to give the paintings added zing.

He is also looking closely at nature. Although some of van Gogh’s paintings were spontaneous outpourings of creative energy, in many cases he plotted out his pictures. He made countless drawings, impassioned sketches in which he worked out compositional elements. His paintings are mindful and premeditated.