Not from the Stars Do I My Judgment Pluck1

t amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot, " wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo. " Normally, one draws and paints the painting during the daytime after the sketch. But I like to paint the thing immediately. It is true that in the darkness I can take a blue for a green, a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since it is hard to distinguish the quality of the tone. But it is the only way to get away from our conventional night with poor pale whit-ish light …. " Despite this affection for the night, van Gogh described Night Café, one of his best known night paintings , as " one of the ugliest I have done. " Though he loved the purity of the night outdoors, he loathed urban night life. " I have attempted to show that the café is a place where a man can ruin himself, become mad, commit a crime…. " He moved away from Paris, where he lived with Theo, to Arles, " wishing to see a new light " and explore the calm. In Paris he had come to know the impressionists and to experiment with broken brushstrokes and the style of the pointillists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. He studied with Fernand Cormon and made friendships and contacts in the art world. His palette was transformed, from dark tones and stillness to yellows and blues and swirling lines. Yet, " When I left you at the station to go south, " he told Theo, " I was very miserable, almost an invalid and almost a drunkard. Now at last something is beginning to show on the horizon: Hope. " Moving to the countryside was an effort to get in touch with a more authentic way to live, to focus on ideas and nourish the spirituality he long sought, fi rst as a student at the seminary and then in art. The simplicity of rural life appealed to him on another level. " I will begin by telling you that this country seems to me as beautiful as Japan as far as the limpidity of the atmosphere and the gay color effects are concerned. " Like many of his contemporaries, van Gogh was fascinated with art from the Orient. He collected and copied woodblock prints and welcomed Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai into the western vernacular. …