Word: motif
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...perhaps connect this yearning for stabilization with Van Gogh's fear of his own ailment, whatever it was (epilepsy complicated by syphilis is a likely guess). It is as though the calmer color, the growing penchant for structuring his work as a process of sequential research into a given motif -- a walled field near the asylum, the olive grove outside it, the pines in the asylum garden -- had an apotropaic use for him, keeping at bay the demons of the unconscious. He wrote incessantly; his letters from the asylum, unmarred by a single note of self-pity, are among...
...whiplash rhythms of art nouveau. But this handwriting was not mechanically stamped on the landscape, as the style marks of mere obsessives tend to be. On the contrary, it was infinitely responsive to the nuances of fact. Dealing with the "difficult bottle-green hue" of his famous motif, the cypress (of which the real landscape around Saint-Remy is now disappointingly short), he went to great trouble to set forth the realities inside its hairy, obelisk-like silhouette: the mauve cast of shadow on the trunk and branches, the sparks of almost pure chrome within the enfolding darkness...
...watch him shifting gears in the portrait of the elderly head attendant of the asylum, Charles-Elzeard Trabuc, is to receive a vivid lesson in the adjustment of manner to motif. Trabuc's cotton jacket, with its emphatic parallel stripes of blackish-blue, is as explicitly stylized as anything produced within the next quarter-century by Klimt or, for that matter, Miro. But in the head, this graphic energy is subordinated to volume, to the immobile self-containment of a man who, Van Gogh realized, "has seen an enormous amount of suffering and death." The chin and mouth are compressed...
...butterfly migration, in fact, may turn into an economic boon for the peasants. Last year the locals guided 50,000 sightseers through the region -- for 500 pesos, about 60 cents each. They also conduct a brisk business selling butterfly-motif postcards, posters and tiles supplied to them at cost by Monarca. "Though it seems a very small amount," says Melody Allen, executive director of the Monarch Project, an Oregon-based lobbying organization that concentrates on protecting similar sites in California, "they are charging enough to make more income than they would if they were logging...
...paralyzed cyclops -- for a split second." But between 1981 and 1983 Hockney scarcely touched a paintbrush; irked by painter's block, he turned to photography to shake it loose, first with a Polaroid SX-70 and then with various popular automatic 35- mm cameras. He would take a motif -- a friend smoking and talking, people around a table, a swimmer in the blue light-dappled water of his Los Angeles pool, an allee of chestnut trees or a green spindly iron chair with pigeons in ) the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris -- and shoot away: click-zip, left-right, up- down, frame...