HORSE CHESTNUT TREE IN BLOSSOM

Good Sunday morning!  Sun's shining, and it's gonna be a beautiful day.  This afternoon we'll be trolleying to our friends' home in another town to share sips, snacks and sups.  Time spent with friends is a precious way to honor our allotted amount of time on this Earth.  These sentiments ring of deep gratitude for those who share their lives with us.  We're living in an age of disgraceful disrespect for the lives of others, and, to me, that's very sad.  It's easier to live one's life with the absence of sources of the world and local news.  If we think of the homeless, the forgotten, the abandoned, the ridiculed, the tortured, well, that gives perfect reason to work on seeing the good and the beautiful where it exists.  

Sunday is an ideal day for positive thinking and planning.  We're all blighted with drama (dislike that word) that has the potential to drive us nuts.  The worst part is that it gets us nowhere.  We can think, re-think, and re-think another thousand times, and our thinking changes nothing.  This is when we have to discipline our minds to find and think about only the good parts of a situation, rather than the bad ones.  I find myself having to do this a lot.  We can visualize Van Gogh working his way through his days holding a paint brush in his hand.  His works show us how someone else created beautiful things while suffering the confines of mental illness.  I cannot help but wonder if Vincent was alive today.  His mental health would be normal and treatable with medication.  He, sadly, lived in a time when the mentally ill were viewed as crazy and needed to be separated from the rest of society.  Vincent's perseverance was his strength.  What the world viewed as inferior painting at the time, the modern world now reveres as superior.  That, we must remember is the total worth of public opinion.

Horse Chestnut Tree in Blossom - 1887  

A Horse Chestnut tree is a large European tree with  clusters of white flowers that blossom in May.  Anne Frank wrote about the horse chestnut tree in the center of Amsterdam.  She saw the tree as a symbol of hope of escape and of one day, a return to normality.  Interestingly, this fits right in with Vincent's battle with mental entrapment.  Maybe he painted the white blossoms as a way to pay homage to Nature's resilience in the hopes that he, too, would be resilient to life's struggles. 

 

He paints the chestnut tree fully leafed out and flowered.  The solid canopy is painted with visible and organized brush strokes.  Notice how Van Gogh sets the tree apart from the grass and other trees with different structures and positioning of the brush strokes.  We see only a glimpse of the tree trunk and branches. Van Gogh's brush strokes are at the heart of his genius.  Each brush stroke came from his soul.  We not only are able to appreciate his work, but also feel it.     

Vincent's journey through life was marred by personal struggles, and his paintings serve as a testament to the power of passion and perseverance.  As we explore his work, we'll see how Nature inspired him to paint landscapes, sunflowers and trees, all reflecting his deep reverence for Nature.  

Before we leave this painting, notice what I believe to be two birds flying on the top left about a half inch down and about an inch inward.  They're almost unnoticeable, yet Vincent wanted them to be part of the scene.  

Research has revealed that this picture was painted on top of a previous one.  Van Gogh frequently re-used his canvases to save money.  No wonder I like him.🖌