Van Gogh's dream road to the stars

Seeing the reference to Van Gogh sunflowers in my poem “A Way of Creating” – which was inspired by a dream encounter with Van Gogh reported by an artist in one of my workshops – a friend reminds me that we now have a marvelous online source on the wellsprings of Van Gogh’s creative process. This is the beautifully edited and translated collection of his letters first made available in 2009 by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

In his letters, Van Gogh speaks of dreams, in his own life and in the lives of other artists. Writing to his brother, he recalls how Corot explained that he colored skies entirely pink because he dreamed them that way:

When good père Corot said a few days before he died: last night I saw in my dreams landscapes with entirely pink skies, well, didn’t they come, those pink skies, and yellow and green into the bargain, in Impressionist landscapes? All this is to say there are things one senses in the future and that really come about. [Letter 611 to Theo Van Gogh, May 20, 1888]

Late the following year, after he committed himself to an asylum in Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh – the master of vibrant color – reports that he isn’t dreaming in pink, but in half-tones. “What I dream of in my best moments aren’t so much dazzling color effects as the half-tones once again.” [Letter 800 To Theo September 5-6, 1889]

Van Gogh describes how what he sees – the stars at night, for example – becomes a deeper and more brilliant vision in his dreams, one from which he can them create. There is the sense that when a painting isn’t quite “there,” he plants it in his dreams and lets it grow from that deep nocturnal ground. He looks at the stars in the night sky and this sets him to dreaming. He painted his celebrated “Starry Night” from memory and dreams, during the day, after looking up at the sky through the bars of his cell ovefrnight.

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Then there is his extraordinary letter to Theo from Arles in July, 1888. It rambles far and wide, even by this standards of this most wandering letter-writer. He paints a word-picture of an old garden where he stole “some excellent figs”. He complains of a lady creditor with “a brain of flintstone or gunflint”. He flits from poetry to coarse body-talk, bemoaning that he has lost the power to bander (get a hard-on), itemizing the cost of paints and canvas, then evoking “the eternal question: is life visible to us in its entirety, or before we die do we know of only one hemisphere?”

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He offers these thoughts to his brother on death and dreaming and the road to the stars.

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The sight of the stars always makes me dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me dream. Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France.

Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star. What’s certainly true in this argument is that while alive, we cannot go to a star, any more than once dead we’d be able to take the train. So it seems to me not impossible that cholera, the stone, consumption, cancer are celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, omnibuses and the railway are terrestrial ones.

To die peacefully of old age would be to go there on foot. [Letter 638 To Theo, July 9/10, 1888]

“We take death to go to a star.” That phrase will be with me now, whenever I look at Van Gogh’s starry skies.

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