Eclipsed Moon and Genius

In the night between September 17 and 18, the dazzling full Moon will be partially dimmed as it travels through the southern part of Earth’s shadow, deep enough to dip, for just over an hour, into the noticeably dark and possibly reddish core of total shadow.

Here is how we show it on pages 100-101 of Astronomical Calendar 2024: the view from Earth along its own shadow; views from the Moon toward Earth as it partially hides the Sun; and the sky for a mid-USA location at mid eclipse, about 10 PM on Sep. 18, with the Moon climbing in the southeast.

Home Planet Higher Life-Forms Department

I think I agree with the consensus that Vincent Van Gogh was one of the greatest painters – maybe one of the half dozen greatest. So the sharpest single fact about him is that at the age of 37 he shot himself in the chest and took two days to die, having gained almost no success in money or reputation. Ironic that his forename, with which he signed his pictures, means “conquering,” “the winner.”

He is one of the most poignant of those who Died Without Knowing – Gregor Mendel, Alfred Wegener, John Kennedy Toole, George Floyd. It’s enough to make even a rationalist wish to be able to believe in life everlasting.

Oh that he could see the thousands pouring in to admire no fewer than 61 of his pictures, at the “Once in a Century” exhibition in London’s National Gallery. We were lucky, being members, to be among the hundreds allowed in on the day it opened, September 14.

I typically want to see how a painting was made, which is the order of actions, and which with the opaque medium of oil becomes an order of layers. This is not as easy to discern in a Van Gogh as in Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne.” After much peering at the pictures, as close as I could get to them, I think that Vincent moved between types of action – therefore layers – many times in a painting. For instance in this –

First have to come the broad fills of color – I’d call them washes, but that suggests paint thinned to transparency – for the sky, roof, building, and soil. Then phases of dabbing one kind of blue onto the other in the sky, and of fills followed by drawing for the features of the building. In each painting you can see that he must have prepared a quantity of what might be called his drawing pigment, to be used in lines and shorter strokes: could be black, but usually a dark shade of some warm or cool color. Objects, on top of the background areas, sometimes start as areas of fill in their own broad colors, later have their edges defined in the drawing pigment; sometimes, conversely, have their edges drawn and then have the fill color squashed into them, as can be seen when it bulges over the drawn edges. This is what I peered for, time and again, in the tree trunks and branches. Clumps of tree foliage start as splashed-on areas of green, later are hacked over with strokes of the drawing pigment to suggest twigginess. But these phases are mixed. Some foliage masses were painted before, some after, tree trunks.

Do these technicalities of physical method matter? I think they do. Artists do not just conceive a picture in the visual imagination and wish it into existence. It comes into existence through a process of intimate interaction between imagination and skill – and strength of will – which feed on and reshape each other.

I would like to know whether Vincent used square-ended brushes for his fill areas, and for the long rectangles of his typical strokes that build areas; and whether he used one of those sticks – I’ve forgotten what they are called – to slide his hand along when drawing his long straight lines. And how – having no wealth from his art like Rubens or Sargent, no studio and team of helpful apprentices, and living in a room in an asylum – he managed to use, thickly, such quantities of oil paint, which requires many brushes and much mess and cleaning up.

The experts who write the information beside the pictures and in the exhibition booklets don’t tell you this sort of thing. They tell you about mood, the spiritual overtones of the picture, its obvious geometry.

Vincent was certainly interested in color.

He was not interested in light, that is, contrast between lit and shadowed regions of the scene, like Rembrandt; he was interest in it in the form of glitter, leaves picked out by sun showering through foliage, moonlight split into ripples by reflection on water.

He was strongly interested in form: craggy outline, as of a mountain horizon, or of a face.

He did sometimes intend some of these elements to express mood: the wounded state of an old tree.

He was interested by, or perhaps by the challenge of, density: masses of repeating small shapes created by the plant kingdom.

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