#WEP/IWSG February challenge - Cafe Terrace - my tribute to the painter, Vincent van Gogh

Hello friends!

For the inaugural WEP 2020 February challenge, I'm taking  a break from #flashfiction and going with a tribute to one of my favorite artists, Vincent van Gogh, that mystic and idealist, who just happens to be the inspiration for this challenge.

Painted in August-September 1888, this painting has had many names - The Night Cafe, Cafe at Night, Place du Forum, Arles, Cafe Terrace. At its first public exhibit in 1891, the work bore the title Café, le soir, or Coffeehouse at Evening. Another name it goes by is Café Terrace on the Place du Forum. To have so many names signifies its importance on so many levels!!

Van Gogh painted this cafe which was open all night in his day. Here vagabonds and drunks would come to find shelter, not knowing where else to go to sleep off their drink and drown their solitude. This cafe was home to them.

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch post-impressionist painter

 who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art.

Even in van Gogh's time, this cafe was central to French culture. A place for a meeting of minds of like-minded souls. This painting was the fruit of a meeting between Guy de Maupassanat and van Gogh and featured at the beginning of de Maupassant's risque novel, Bel Ami. Even though set in Paris, it's Arles he's describing...

It was one of those sultry, Parisian evenings when not a breath of air is stirring; the sewers exhaled poisonous gases and the restaurants the disagreeable odors of cooking and of kindred smells. Porters in their shirt-sleeves, astride their chairs, smoked their pipes at the carriage gates, and pedestrians strolled leisurely along, hats in hand.

Van Gogh loved to paint the night. He loved the colors, the mellow blues, violets and greens.  He wrote 'the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.' Astronomers have studied the placement of the stars in the painting and have lauded van Gogh for getting them exactly right for August/September in his part of the world.

I visited this cafe in Arles two years ago. I was thrilled it was still there as if waiting for the triumphal return of the unfortunate van Gogh who immortalised the cafe. It's been renamed Cafe van Gogh which I think is adorable. This is what it looks like today. Not a lot different from van Gogh's day.

It was still a feast of colour on a bleak winter's night. I stood shivering in the forum, but it was not going to open for me, more's the pity. Had to grab a bite at some ordinary eatery across the way and gaze at it throughout the meal, imagining the roisterous time being had by all in Cafe Terrace 100 or so years back.

I'm not one to sit inside cafes, but here is part of the inside taken from one of my books:

Café Terrace at Night ranks second in a list of the top ten most reproduced artworks of all time. Van Gogh's Starry Night holds first place. I was thrilled to find an airbnb on the Rhone River in Arles when I visited. It reflected this view.  The owner was a van Gogh fanatic who sat me down with a map and highlighter and documented the 'van Gogh trail' for me to follow. I was just as happy sitting at the window of my 'room with a view.'

When I was in Paris at the end of 2019, it seems they've suddenly discovered how fantastic van Gogh's artwork reproduces. I saw Starry Night suitcases and van Gogh reproductions on scarves, especially Cafe Terrace. I couldn't resist buying one and Sunflowers as a gift for someone. Can't wait for the end of the Australian heatwave to wear mine!

Go Vincent van Gogh!

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#WEPff post--The Starry Night -- CONSTELLATIONS as seen by Vincent van Gogh

The October challenge for Write...Edit...Publish (WEP) is to write to the prompts, CONSTELLATIONS or HALLOWEEN or a combination of both.

The minute Yolanda ran the idea of CONSTELLATIONS by me, Vincent van Gogh's painting, The Starry Night and Don McLean's tribute, Vincent, came to mind. 

I've long been fascinated by van Gogh and have visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam which holds 200 of his paintings, 400 of his drawings and 700 of his letters. 

So, I've gone with my van Gogh inspiration, taken some poetic licence with the blurry facts of his life and death, weaved in some direct quotes from him, added relevant paintings and painting detail, and come up with a creative non-fiction piece from Vincent's POV.

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889
Displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City

The Darkness of the Soul

The Starry Night.

The curving lines of hills, of mountains, of sky are silhouetted in the dying breath of day. The brilliant colours of blues, of yellows, of greens, take on a mystic hue when no sun lights their fire.

As the fit overtakes me, I clench my fists and imagine…

All colours blending into one.

Colours changing hue.

Flaming flowers brightly blaze

Swirling clouds in violet haze…

Taking ragged breaths, I hit my head against the cypress tree outside the compound This tree is one of many planted as a windbreak by farmers long ago. Waves of wheat with shuddering golden stalks roar like the sea and crash in the goddess-blown winds. Morning fields of amber grain, a bronze curtain, flicker through my mind.

Colour. The life present within colour. Colours with a life of their own.

I wrestle with how to find an adequate means of portraying a spiritual experience through my application of colour. Colour represents the value of existence; it represents life itself.

I gaze mesmerised at the countryside surrounding Saint-Paul-de-Mausole. Long before sunrise, the sky is empty of everything but the morning star, then lesser stars appear one by one.  

The mountain range of the Alpilles dominates the fields of corn, the rows of grapes and the groves of olives across the valley. The mountains shimmer with the power of God as He sprays constellations across the horizon in a broad band of light.

The night is even more richly coloured than the day, coloured with intense violets, blues and greens. Some stars are lemony, others exude a pink, green, forget-me-not blue glow.

I must capture the shifting landscape of the night. I must capture its beauty, its majesty, its terror. I must impress in my works the harmony, the organised unity of nature.

Now in July of 1889, in the quaint village of Saint-Rémy, the time has come to finish what I have begun.

I press my bandaged ear, quieting the voices. The only voice I crave is the voice of God.

I set my canvas and render my night imaginings, not en plein air, but in the studio gifted to me for the duration of my stay.

What a contrast to the sky of Paris. Here in France profond, the sky suffers no interference from gas or electric street lights or garish shop fronts. 

The sky here is as pure as God.

I have painted the starry night over the Rhone, but now I will paint the starry night over my little village.

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night over the Rhone,1888

The sky I will paint is blue, bluer than the irises I love to paint. Those voluptuous irises, those crammed, ripe, moist excesses of nature anchored in the warm red soil. That contrast between the deep blue of the finely-drawn buds and the bold green leaves with their tongue-like forms against a backdrop of the light green flowering meadow. They radiate light from within, creating that balanced connected harmony I crave.

A cosmic happening is taking place. My brush and the canvas are as one.

The stars, whorls of yellow and white, are a reflection of my beloved sunflowers or the summer wheat at harvest.  Two gigantic spiral nebulae entwine; eleven enormously enlarged stars with their aureoles of light break through the night. The winding, wavy curls reach their tendrils towards the rising sickle of the unreal orange-coloured moon which overlooks the star-lit village. Bathed in moonlight, the houses are barely visible, lumpen shadows, short, sharp dashes amongst the trees. Dominating the shadowy village is the silhouette of the lone church, its spires reaching towards God, reaching towards salvation.

But the church is temporal. So I imagine the swaying cypresses in the foreground to resemble church spires—nature overpowering man-made structures.

It is not so much the language of painting as that of nature which one must listen to.

By flickering strokes of my brush, my cypresses reach upwards like green flaming tongues; even the edges of my painting will not constrain their unbridled growth.

They are as beautifully-proportioned as an Egyptian obelisk. Why has no one else rendered them the way I see them?

The brooding landscape comes alive, my brushstrokes pure and true. My fingers move in arcs of crazed creativity. I must finish before the fit takes me again.

Finally, it is done.

The night landscape I imagined will live on forever in minds which accept the elemental things of life, such as nature, objects, people, joy, salvation…

The night wraps around me like my mother's arms as I hurry through the fields to my death.

‘Mother! Mother!’ 

I can no longer exist in this world of staggering turmoil.

I spin through the darkness of the soul and my overwhelming fear. I wrap my arms around my beloved cypress tree. I am deep below the surface of my life, choking, gasping, retching. 

I am desperate for air, but not desperate for life.

I have nowhere to go. No one to help me with the demons that taunt, the thoughts of suicide that scream in my head.

I am ready to play the role of a madman, although I do not have the strength…

How does one end life? A shot to the head would send me spiralling like those yellow stars reaching out for the yellow moon.

My guard sleeps, his mouth a smile of utter blissfulness. He dreams of a saner world than mine. If I had the time, I would paint him…

Will I be watching from above as they ponder my death? Will I be as one with the night sky? Will my brother forgive me?

My stomach explodes in shards of bitter pain. I fall onto the sweet grass of Deep France, watching the starry night fade, the colours blend into one as life ebbs away.

I have reached the stars…I am one with the heavenly constellations…

REFERENCES:
The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Van Gogh, Ingo F. Walther, TASHEN Press

979 words

FCA

This story is an entry in the WEP October challenge.
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