Copying the Masters 3. My starry night.

Interpreting and portraying this image is a bit like portraying my thoughts and leaving my soul free to move, even if I find myself looking at the world as if from the window of a room, like Van Gogh in that distant month of June 1889.

My monochromatic colors do not faithfully reproduce his colors, but it is precisely through this "manipulation" that I can offer my personal view and internalize it.

Vincent's cypress becomes my cypress, my obstacle (or my obstacles), my intermediary between earth and sky, like a flame that yearns for the Infinite, stretched out as I am in search of all the answers that I don't have now !!!

"Looking at the sky always makes me dream..."

My colors (non-colors) and those of Vincent are contrasting, rich in tonal contrasts.

Van Gogh thought that "the night was more alive and more richly colored than the day", which is why colors are not needed to make that same whirlwind of emotions mine.

I look at my vortex of stars, I find myself at the center of an almost magical, cosmic and supernatural energy of the stars and the moon. In the chaos of the sky I perceive the wind that moves, that takes away and that brings closer. The same chaos that I feel within myself now, despite my simple apparent tranquility, similar to that of that village at night, with the hills, perhaps those of my Brianza, our Montevecchia, or Osnago, with that tranquil order that in the rarefied the quiet of the night and of the domestic nests hides the solitude of my soul, now a little lost.

I feel my smallness and my fragility in front of the sublime powerful magnificence of Heaven, which becomes with a capital "C" and Immense. Infinite.

I chose this image because it allows me to represent the dizzying feelings I have inside.

The night is life, the night gives a space to reflect, the awareness of looking inside and at the same time looking beyond "the window". Beyond.

The night brings counsel.

The night is my starting point: it is just before the rise of my new sun, perhaps a more beautiful sun.

The night is a bit like the journey of the soul wrapped in an evening cuddle, but also in sleep caused by continuous and prolonged anxieties: this journey however, albeit in a tremor of touches and sensations, leads the soul to look up , to take life back into my own hands, strengthened by a new awareness: my choice, my change, as well as my need to be in one of those little houses, among the olive trees looking at the Sky and finding Someone great again.

I tried to reproduce Van Gogh's different touches, in a methodical, almost geometric way: it comes close to my way of being, introverted and sensitive: calm but full of contrasts that some time ago I had not learned to accept and even before that to recognise. I saw myself in a gray of difficult moments that from disordered feelings and moods as I am now also bring me back up, to freedom, to life and to the beauty of his flow, unexpected and freely spontaneous.

"If I'm worth nothing today, I won't be worth anything tomorrow either.

But if tomorrow they discover values in me, it means that I also possess them today.

Indeed, wheat is wheat, even if people, at first, take it for grass."

(Vincent Van Gogh).

I felt the weight of people on me, or rather, people as Van Gogh defines them, strangers, but also people who were friends and yet ready only for judgement. I felt them hostile and superficial in their closeness, sometimes only hypothetical. But, it happens (and it always happens!!!) that being yourself is the only way, the only truth, the only opportunity to be free and exist.

It happens that only with this awareness does the world around us change, only when we change ourselves; it happens then that new lights shine here and there, albeit distant and sometimes changing.

It's still...

It happens that when someone in the world really notices you and gets to read inside you, the truth, what you are, your thoughts, even when you are not yet ready to communicate them, it happens that all this serves and means that it is not true that is worth nothing, which may perhaps be the case today, but not that it will be the same tomorrow.

When that moment comes (and it always comes, even if sometimes late) the values and principles we believe in make us win, but not for others or in front of others: precisely for ourselves.

And it becomes joy; it's happiness, it's serenity.

It happens that my night becomes starry, enriched by my colors.

Or perhaps every night each of us can read ourselves: it is enough to stop, observe, feel, and the colors shine on us, each with their own light.

It was June 19, 1889.

Even through this date I was able to feel this image as mine: my painting in my date.

June 19th, day of the birth of a very important person for my entire life; December 19th, a familiar date, but also a symbol of the beginning in my life: of inner birth, of return to real life or life for the first time.

Making this drawing was an opportunity through which I was able to express my inner journey through the portrait of one of the most beautiful paintings of all time, what I define as the picture of the life of each of us.

There can be moments of strong dizziness, empty spaces here and there, but then we see a tremble of hope, first timid and then increasingly bold until it allows us to rise again and make all the emotions dormant for too long resurface. Then the restlessness gives way to contemplation, to awareness of oneself and the world, to serenity and a placid sense of quiet.

This is meant to be "My Starry Night".

                                                                                                                            Anna