Starry night

 

https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/2097263966921605204?s=20

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

Reading the comments on this post told me everything I need to know about art. So many of you wrote to say you felt the exact same thing I did standing in front of the Starry Night. That strange pull, the sense that the painting is somehow alive... It turns out the feeling is completely universal. I am not someone who gets emotional easily. But every so often a piece of art really gets to me. And that is exactly what happened the first time i walked up to Van Gogh's magnum opus. I know how that sounds, it is one of the most famous paintings on earth, almost a cliché to be moved by it. But maybe it is that famous for a reason... It genuinely looks like it is moving while you stand there, shifting in a way I cannot explain and have never seen in any of the thousands of paintings I have looked at in my life. The same day I took the photo below, I also filmed this short video. It still comes nowhere near the real thing, but you can at least catch a little more of it here, the thick ridges of paint, the way the stars and swirls lift right off the canvas. This technique is called "impasto", from the Italian for mixture. It means paint laid on so thickly that every brushstroke and ridge stays visible on the surface. Van Gogh piled it on with a loaded brush, building the stars up thick so they would blaze as bright as possible against the dark. But no video and no explanation of technique can really convey what it feels like to stand in front of it. And the fact that so many of you felt the very same thing says something true about what art is really for. Tolstoy said it best: "The receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s, as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist. In this uniting of it with others lies the great attractive force of art."

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

I took this photo four years ago, standing right in front of it at the MoMA in New York, and nothing had prepared me for the real thing. Seeing The Starry Night in person is still one of the most magical things art has ever done to me... What a screen can never show you is the paint itself: Van Gogh squeezed it straight from the tube onto the canvas, building the sky in thick, raised ridges you can practically feel, so the stars and swirls stand up off the surface and catch the light as you walk by. It's not just a picture of the night sky, it's a physical storm of paint, and standing before it, everything seems to move. He made it in 1889, from the barred window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, during one of the darkest moments of his life. He wrote to his brother Theo that the night was "more alive and more richly colored than the day," and once you have seen it with your own eyes, you understand exactly what he meant...

Jean-François Millet

We visited the Normandy birthplace of Jean-François Millet recently, which is now a museum. It's about 30 minutes west from where we are living in Cherbourg.

Millet was influential on Van Gogh, Monet, etc.

Good overview on Wikipedia here, along with links to his most famous paintings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Millet

Influence on Van Gogh

https://mymodernmet.com/jean-francois-millet-inspired-vincent-van-gogh/

Left: Jean-François Millet, “Shearing Sheep,” 1852–3 (Photo: Museum of Fine Arts via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Right: Vincent van Gogh, “The Sheep-Shearer (after Millet),” 1889 (Photo: Van Gogh Museum via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

While Millet was a pioneering Realist painter in his own right, he became even more renowned through his influence on Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). The Post-Impressionist painter—who was active more than a decade after Millet's death—made numerous references in letters, drawings, and paintings to Millet's oeuvre, finding creative inspiration in his depictions of working-class people.

Van Gogh felt a strong connection to farmers and laborers, who he believed lived noble lives, working with the land.

Left: Jean-François Millet, “The Sower,” 1850 (Photo: Museum of Fine Arts via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Right: Vincent van Gogh, “The Sower (after Millet,” 1881 (Photo: Van Gogh Museum via Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

One of the motifs that frequently reappears in Van Gogh's art is a depiction of a man sowing a field. Based on Millet's painting The Sower from 1850, Van Gogh made over 30 works inspired by this figure during his lifetime. To Van Gogh—who found spiritual meaning in the environment—this image conveyed the dignity of cultivating the land.

While Van Gogh often copied this portrait directly as a source of comfort, he also included it in paintings, like two from 1888; one merged his admiration for Millet with his love of Japanese prints—two hallmarks of his style.

https://www.coolstoriesabout.art/p/how-millet-shaped-van-gogh

Text to video - Edinburgh

 

Kōda

@aimikoda

MiniMax H3 - Text to Video A city painted into existence. Change the city name and quote text and use it for any city. Prompt: [CITY_NAME] = EDINBURGH [QUOTE] = A city carved from stone and story. Create a fast, dense, cinematic 16:9 macro travel film where the entire identity of [CITY_NAME] is continuously painted into existence by living oil paint. Use a low grazing macro camera with extremely shallow depth of field. The world is a vast canvas covered in thick wet impasto paint, sculpted brushstroke ridges, carved grooves, glossy reflections and dense gold glitter. The paint must behave like an active force at all times. It flows like rivers, sweeps like brushwork, gathers like tides, curls at the edges, spills into new paths and physically constructs the city in real time. The film must feel fast, rich and uninterrupted. Use one continuous flowing camera move with no cuts. The camera races across the canvas, skimming over wet paint valleys, weaving between rising structures, accelerating through the city as new landmarks constantly appear ahead. Avoid slow drifting. Keep the visual progression energetic and tightly packed. Start with abstract moving pigment and rapidly transition into recognizable city formation. Show thick paint strokes being laid down, dragged, folded and pulled into shape by an invisible artistic force. Let streams of pigment split and merge like waterways, while dimensional brushstroke masses rise into streets, bridges, domes, towers, rooftops, plazas, canals and layered miniature architecture. Make the city feel as if it is being painted and built at the same time. Reveal many landmarks across the journey, not just one. Let the camera travel seamlessly through the whole city, with one landmark flowing directly into the next. As the camera advances, fresh paint forms arches, facades, bell towers, canal edges, stairways, statues, porticoes and skyline silhouettes associated with [CITY_NAME]. The transitions between landmarks should feel fluid and continuous, with brushstrokes extending forward to pull the viewer deeper into the city. Make the paint motion highly visible and expressive. Show pigment actively spreading across canvas, pouring into channels, stacking into forms, curving into structures and leaving wet textured trails behind. Gold glitter should move with the paint and collect along ridges and valleys, creating sparkling highlights that emphasize speed, direction and shape. Use warm golden key light from the lower left to ignite glossy paint and glitter. Add cool purple-blue ambient fill from the upper right to maintain a dreamy dusk atmosphere. Keep the distant background soft with haze and circular bokeh, but preserve strong clarity on the active foreground paint and newly formed landmarks. Toward the end, the camera rises and pulls back just enough to reveal a broader final view of the fully formed painted city, making it clear that the viewer has traveled through an entire living city built from moving paint. End on a striking travel-poster composition. Place elegant typography in the top left with generous breathing room. Show [CITY_NAME] in refined serif uppercase, with [QUOTE] beneath it in smaller delicate type. The overall feeling should be luxurious, poetic and visually intense, with continuous motion, dense landmark reveals and the clear impression that the whole city is being painted alive in real time.

https://x.com/aimikoda/status/2094490203335352524?s=20

Christina's World

 

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

This is one of the most famous paintings in America, and most people have no idea what they are actually looking at... The painting is Christina's World, made by Andrew Wyeth in 1948, and the woman was real: her name was Anna Christina Olson, Wyeth's neighbour in Cushing, Maine. Since childhood a degenerative condition had slowly taken the strength from her legs, until walking was no longer possible. She refused a wheelchair, and for her entire adult life she chose to drag herself across the ground with her arms instead, going wherever she wanted to go under her own power. Wyeth saw her one afternoon from an upstairs window, alone in that vast field, crawling slowly toward the house on the hill. He said the painting was an attempt to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless. Her world, he said, was limited physically but by no means spiritually. That is what turns this painting from a portrait of frailty into one of the most triumphant images ever made... Look at it long enough and it stops being about what her body took from her, and becomes about what she would not stop doing anyway. The field is enormous and she is small and the house is far away, and still she goes, because the alternative, to be carried, to give up, to let the distance win, was something she simply would not accept. There is one more thing: Christina loved this painting. Pink was her favorite color, and Wyeth had placed her exactly where she most wanted to be, out in the open, in her own field, under her own sky. Late in her life, when she could no longer even crawl out to that field, she said something that holds the whole meaning of art inside it: "Andy put me where he knew I wanted to be. Now that I can’t be there anymore, all I do is think of that picture, and I’m there."

George Hart

@Vera_Icona_23

·

2h

Andrew Wyeth is buried in the small Olson family graveyard about 200 feet away from where Christina is depicted in the painting She & her brother are buried there also As now is Andy's wife Betsy