*Note: I've randomly decided to start blogging again which I generally only do when I'm overseas somewhere and I want to share my experience with the folks back home. We'll see how long this lasts, my money is on about a week and a half tops.
The other morning my roommate came up the stairs and said "I miss starry starry night." The laptop that I've had since I was seventeen had a skin on it of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Starry Night and I sort became known for it. At Christmas time, my computer kicked the bucket and I had to get a new one (even though my brother ended up picking the bucket back up and selling the repaired computer later) and though I looked for my next painting even before I got the new computer, to this point, the laptop remains bare. I must first explain why I chose this painting to color my life for the years that it did.
In High School, we had a lesson once about the creative process and the things that inspire people. The teacher showed us pictures of the stars and then showed us how Van Gogh had attempted to capture them and then showed us a song that had been written about the painting. This painting, came to represent to me the way that people have the power to inspire each other and the way that expression and art is not only some existential journey, but a lovely manifestation of human interdependence and God's intimate involvement thereof.
My new naked computer has been naked long enough (and not just because it's getting dirty and scratched from the weird places that I use my computer. I had originally chosen a painting called The Terrace at the Sainte Adresse by our own dear Claude Monet, but it stopped speaking to me before I saved up the money to order the skin. So, I've instead chosen to color my life with a piece called A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat.
Because I am in theatre and because Stephen Sondheim wrote a musical in the 80s about this painting, most people that I frequently associate with will assume that I chose this because of its connection to my theatrical life. Truly, there are paintings that I find more beautiful, Caspar David Friedrich has done some incredible things and no one deals with light (which I am fascinated by) the way that Rembrandt does. And there are a thousand paintings that have moved me in museums around the world that I may never be able to see again because the artists names and the paintings titles have long since left me.
My connection to this painting cannot be separated from Sondheim and his musical, but it is not based solely on it. We worked briefly with that musical in my musical scene study class and exploring the content of these scenes in depth unearthed things that mean the world to me and to my understanding of art.
I love the something crazed in George's creative process and the way it pulls him to it the way it pulls him to it nearly as strongly as his love draws him to Dot. In a way, I even love the exquisiteness of the resulting heartbreak and I love the tragedy of a man whose life's work came down to making a hat where there never was a hat and he wasn't appreciated for it in his lifetime. I love that though simplistic, there is still something incredible about creation and the wonder of finding there is something there that wasn't there before because of you. In creation, you come close to godhood, but in loving you become a god and I love grappling between those things because love can be so painful too. I love that in the end Dot is surprised by joy, in that though she didn't end up with the person she should've belonged with, there was something beautiful about her having been allowed to know that love like that exists.
Most of all, I love that somebody could look at this painting and never know any of the above or what it meant to the artist. There's likely a thousand heart-wrenching stories that I've seen in strokes and colors and never known that I was seeing them. Though Sondheim took liberties with the facts of the story, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte reminds me that there are a million stories worth telling that are waiting for the right mouth or the right pen or the right heart to tell them.
