Starry Starry Night

Song: Vincent (Starry Starry Night)
Artist: Don Mclean

Starry starry night
Paint your palette blue and grey
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul



Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land.



Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now.



Starry starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of China blue.



Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are smoothed beneath the artist's loving hand.



Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen they did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now.



For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left in sight on that
Starry starry night.
You took your life as lovers often do,
But I could have told you Vincent
This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.



Starry starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget.



Like the stranger that you've met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloddy rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.



Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free.
They would not listen they're not listening still
Perhaps they never will.

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回复zhang3feng的评论:

Well-said.

[zhang3feng]

deeply deeply moved. To be a great artist is to be lonely.

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回复tryToDoIt的评论:

Thank you.

Have a nice weekend,

Rebecca

[tryToDoIt]

NICE POST

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回复静谧海湾的评论:

My pleasure.

Have a nice week,

Rebecca

[静谧海湾]

I listened this song all the morning because it is so beautiful and it is about great Van Gogh...

After reading through this post at lunch time I know the story behind the song. Such a touching song and story.

Thanks for sharing beauty and knowledge all the time.

Wish you have a nice Monday

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Don Richard McLean's Albums

Year Album
1970 Tapestry
1971 American Pie
1972 Don McLean
1973 Playin' Favorites
1974 Homeless Brother
1976 Solo (LIVE)
1977 Prime Time
1978 Chain Lightning
1981 Believers
1982 Dominion (LIVE)
1987 Love Tracks
1989 For the Memories Vols I & II
1989 And I Love You So (UK Release)
1990 Headroom
1991 Christmas
1995 The River of Love
1997 Christmas Dreams
2001 Sings Marty Robbins
2001 Starry Starry Night (LIVE)
2003 You've Got to Share: Songs for Children
2003 The Western Album
2004 Christmas Time!
2005 Rearview Mirror: An American Musical Journey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_mclean

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Don Richard McLean 简介：

Background information
Birth name Donald Richard McLean
Born 2 October 1945(1945-10-02)
Genre(s) Folk
Folk rock
Occupation(s) singer-songwriter
Instrument(s) Vocals Guitar Piano
Years active 1970 - present
Website http://www.don-mclean.com/

Donald Richard McLean (born October 2, 1945 in New Rochelle, New York) is an American singer-songwriter. He is most famous for his 1971 songs "American Pie" and "Vincent".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_mclean

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Vincent van Gogh 简介：

Birth name Vincent Willem van Gogh
Born 30 March 1853(1853-03-30)
Zundert, The Netherlands
Died 29 July 1890 (aged 37)
Auvers-sur-Oise, France
Nationality Dutch
Field Painter
Movement Post-Impressionism
Famous works The Potato Eaters, Sunflowers, The Starry Night, Irises, Portrait of Dr. Gachet

Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. His paintings and drawings include some of the world's best known, most popular and most expensive pieces.

Van Gogh spent his early life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide.

The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh

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Song: Vincent (Starry Starry Night)
Artist: Don Mclean

http://space.wenxuecity.com/media/1188752744.wma

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Vincent van Gogh's Work

Van Gogh drew and painted water-colours while he went to school, though very few of these works survive, and his authorship is challenged for many claimed to be from this period. When he committed himself to art as an adult (1880), he started at the elementary level by copying the "Cours de dessin," edited by Charles Bargue and published by Goupil & Cie. Within his first two years he began to seek commissions, and in spring 1882, his uncle, Cornelis Marinus (owner of a renowned gallery of contemporary art in Amsterdam) asked him to provide drawings of the Hague; Van Gogh's work did not prove up to his uncle's expectations. Despite this, Uncle Cor (or "C.M. " as he was referred to by his nephews) offered a second commission, specifying the subject matter in detail, but he was once again disappointed with the result.

Nevertheless, Van Gogh persevered with his work. He improved the lighting of his atelier (studio) by installing variable shutters, and experimented with a variety of drawing materials. For more than a year he worked hard on single figures—highly elaborated studies in "black and white," which at the time gained him only criticism. Nowadays they are appreciated as his first masterpieces. In spring 1883, he embarked on multi-figure compositions, based on the drawings. He had some of them photographed, but when his brother commented that they lacked liveliness and freshness, Vincent destroyed them and turned to oil painting. Already in autumn 1882, Theo had enabled him to do his first paintings, but the amount Theo could supply was soon spent. Then, in spring 1883, Vincent turned to renowned Hague School artists like Weissenbruch and Blommers, and received technical support from them, as well as from painters like De Bock and Van der Weele, both Hague School artists of the second generation. When he moved to Nuenen, after the intermezzo in Drenthe, he started various large size paintings, but he destroyed most of them himself. The Potato Eaters and its companion pieces, The Old Tower on the Nuenen cemetery and The Cottage, are the only ones that have survived. After a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Vincent was aware that many faults of his paintings were due to a lack of technical experience. So he went to Antwerp, and later to Paris to improve his technical skill.

This piece from the Hermitage Museum was painted six weeks before the artist's death, at around eight o'clock on 16 June 1890, as astronomers determined by Venus's position in the painting.More or less acquainted with impressionist and neo-impressionist techniques and theories, Van Gogh went to Arles to develop these new possibilities. But within a short time, older ideas on art and work reappeared: ideas like doing series on related or contrasting subject matter, which would reflect the purpose of art. Already in 1884 in Nuenen he had worked on a series that was to decorate the dining room of a friend in Eindhoven. Similarly in Arles, in spring 1888 he arranged his Flowering Orchards into triptychs, began a series of figures which found its end in The Roulin Family, and finally, when Gauguin had consented to work and live in Arles side by side with Vincent, he started to work on the The Décoration for the Yellow House, probably the most ambitious effort he ever undertook. Most of his later work is elaborating or revising its fundamental settings.

The paintings from the Saint-Rémy period are often characterized by swirls and spirals. The patterns of luminosity in these images have been shown to conform to Kolmogorov's statistical model of turbulence. At various times in his life Van Gogh painted the view from his window; this culminated in the great series of paintings of the wheat field he could see from his adjoining cells in the asylum at Saint-Rémy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_van_Gogh