Clytie by Evelyn De Morgan (1886-87)

Herbert James Draper (English, 1863-1920) Clyties of the Mist, 1912

sunflowers

Herbert James Draper, Clyties of the Mist, 1912

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Lucas: Peony - symbolizes bashfulness and compassion; the big fluffy blossoms symbolize healing and care.

Max: Gladiolus - symbolizes strength of character, faithfulness and honor

El: Lily - symbolize feminine beauty and purity

Dustin: Tulip - symbolize eternal love and devotion

Mike: Marguerite - symbolizes love fortune telling, secret love, fidelity, and sincerity

Will: Sunflower - symbolizes adoration and dedication and dedicated love.

nonsense yet again

Requests from our Pokemon-themed draw-stream! @coffeecakecatt doodled the Pokemon, I did the trainer designs as picked by chat. Thanks everyone for dropping by!

Finished the Goghie picture, the colors make her even more radiant, thank you for the request!

The Morning Mists (Clyties of the Mist) by Herbert James Draper (1912)

A Gogh that I drew for @fatedtime! I had a lot of fun with the paint smear effect.

vincent van gogh’s sister willemina exchanged letters with her brother until his death, though her side of the correspondence has been lost and the contents of her letters can only be extrapolated from vincent’s responses. in one of vincent’s letters to her he responds to her expressing a desire to become a writer and gives his review on the piece she wrote called “planten & den regen” (plants and the rain). vincent’s response to planten & den regen is the only remaining record of willemina’s writings and his interpretation of the piece is that it’s about the potential for growth inherent in everything even if it doesn’t come to fruition, and the providence of higher powers. he also tells her not to worry about needing an education to become a writer, falling in love and living a full life would serve her far better on that front. (source on the letter)

after her brothers vincent and theo as well as her father all died in close succession, willemina’s own mental health slowly deteriorated and eventually she was taken into a psychiatric institution. surviving patient records describe her as often sitting completely motionless in her chair for hours on end, alternated with violent outbursts and strong hallucinations. although she occasionally attempted suicide, her caretakers kept her from succeeding and she ultimately died of old age. (source, in dutch)

both the plants in the rain and the chair are referenced in van gogh’s noble phantasm animation. it’s very particular imagery that has no direct relation to vincent or clytie, the plant in the rain alone could be taken to refer to clytie being a water nymph that turned into a plant but the chair makes it too specific to be about anyone else. vincent’s interpretation of willemina’s writing also aligns with the function of her noble phantasm, namely to make foreigner servants achieve their full potential in accordance with the providence of the foreign gods. the van gogh part of her saint graph isn’t just vincent.

this is kind of event spoilers for na at this point i suppose (boo just read fantranslations like the rest of us if you’re following me you knew about her components already anyway) but it’s pretty obvious the whole time that she’s not really vincent and neither did the foreign god that cobbled her together directly use the person vincent. she barely refers to herself as vincent, if at all, it’s pretty much always just van gogh as far as I remember. they took the base of clytie’s body and then grafted the misery, the reputation of the name van gogh onto her. vincent was just a depressed and unsuccessful painter in life, it’s only posthumously that he ended up getting held up as some kind of patron saint of mentally ill artists. armchair psychologists turned to figuring out what was wrong with willemina as a way to figure out what was wrong with vincent all to figure out how it connected to his art. the foreign god didn’t want “vincent” it wanted "the van gogh that went mad”, “the madness at the root of van gogh’s art” to function as their evil apotheosis catalyst and there was more than one source of that. obviously she’s neither vincent or willemina. she’s not even really clytie. but she’s made of what they’ve been made to represent so the name van gogh is hers to use if she wants it.

clytie