Personal Reflections, by Arthur Secunda
For me, Arlesienne Night is a very significant
lithograph. It was part of the original Arles Suite that I later
exhibited in Arles in the South of France. When I lived there, I
was nurtured by the incredible landscape and memory of Van Gogh.
The Camargue and the experience of living there (the French call it
hyper-experience) was extremely intense. Many artists in this
century have discovered why Van Gogh was so attracted by and
committed to the landscape and lore of Arles (although as is known,
the Arlesiennes had no great love for him).
My lithograph might have been titled "The Ghost of Van Gogh" or
"Homage to Vincent." It's kind of an epilogue to the heritage of
Van Gogh drama. The branches of a tree are illuminated against a
strange moonlight, almost batlike, eclipsing the trees. Like many
artists, I've been influenced by Van Gogh and, in this litho
particularly, by a small painting he did in Arles of a sower of
seeds who is working and walking by a tree. Its branches are
slicing the sky, so to speak, and I'm sure that my unconscious
carried that idea of branches and sun forming a grid or net or
weblike image across the upper plane of the picture. The experience
of remembering or of pulling forms from my memory bank must be
second nature as an unconscious resource.
The black to red-orange to deep yellow blend is technically very
complex. It may look simple because it's so clean and pure, but
it's very complicated, starting from the sky through the distant
mountain to the earth below. Something in the color is a little
spooky (not unlike Halloween color). There is a vibration of
witchcraft in the combinations of black, orange, and yellow. When
the forms of the tree branches were created, the torn paper
contours simulated elongated fingers, a prehistoric animal or
praying mantis sliding across the tranquil (even geometric)
landscape below. The sky, which is black with moonlight, is night.
But the color below is daylight and the moon is projecting its
fierce glow below as a spotlight might, coming from a dark sky.
There is also an element of life and death in the black (death)
sky, radiating the light of life.
It's a very emotional work to me because of these effects. The
peaceful illusion of a deep colored landscape is deceptive. The
planes of overloaded color recede toward a mountain shape on the
bottom of the work, then blend up toward the top where the lights
are flashing. The forms are sharp and the simulated paper and the
tears on the edges of the branches are screaming or piercing by
their sharpness. There's a passive-aggressive violence to this
piece and, in a certain way, it corresponds to the feeling of
latent explosive emotion in the last paintings of Van Gogh. The
crows flying over the cornfields were very much a part of the life
and death intensity and symbolism that Van Gogh experienced and
related to us.
I would like to think that I captured at least a small semblance
of the danger or harbinger of death in Arlesienne Night. The
threatening sensation of the creative struggle between life and art
and his subject, so eloquently unfolded by Van Gogh, is an unspoken
quality. I feel very strongly about the town of Arles and its
history. Incredible peace sits side by side with unknown danger and
the mysteries of life in Arles. In many ways, Arlesienne
Night embodies these mixed intensifies to me about my feelings
for Arles.
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