Arles and Why Part 1

Vincent. It does go back to that poisoned genius time and again, doesn’t it. Vincent in Arles, I had imagined, standing beside the Rhone painting Starry Starry Night fleetingly free from the wasps of madness. It was not painted there, I discovered, but in St. Remy, to the Northeast, where he was bundled off to really recoup. Starry Starry Night was paintedted after his time in Arles and is a swirling rendition of mad fear. When I looked at his output in the city at the top of the Carmague, the Rhonic delta, I saw another man’s moment of light, paint, creation, a man more entranced than anxious. The many other canvases that were once wet under Arles’ Provencal sun spring now to mind: the nauseating and oddly sinister barroom, the off-kilter bedroom, the woman at a table pre-cursing Picasso, the terrace café so utterly Arletan.