Tag: Monday Mood

Mood: Monday

Photo previously posted here was of a version of Cindy Ruskin’s painting I’m Nobody, oil on canvas. You can check out more of her work on that link to her Instagram account.

More from me:

Back on June 7, I posted this photo with the intention of coming back to both those books when I felt less scattered and could create a post about them. Later in June, in a Mood: Monday post, I shared a painting of a pinecone and talked at length about Maggie Smith’s memoir. But I’m not sure I ever explained why I had all the Post-it Flags in the book of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.

Acts of Light is a beautiful book filled with paintings and drawings by Nancy Ekholm Burkert to accompany some of the eighty Dickinson poems within it. It’s possible my friends Christine and John gave me this book as a balm for being the first ones to tell me that much of Dickinson’s poetry can be sung to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas.” I whimpered to them that from that moment on, I could only sing, “I heard a fly buzz when I died/ the stillness in the room” as if it were “There’s a yellow rose in Texas, that I am gonna see.” I love yellow roses and have nothing against this wonderful old Texas standard, but it’s a little upbeat for the poem. =)

Disregarding all that, I decided that at some point, I’m going to print the pen and ink drawings and color them, and those are the pages I’ve marked. I’m not sure I can ever share them online because of copyright issues, so they’ll be only for my own enjoyment. But after finishing Apple TV’s “Dickinson,” I began to wonder about art that might have been inspired by her poetry, and that’s why I found and chose the first painting on this post.


I have a few books with Dickinson’s best-known, studied, or taught poems, but I’m delighted to have received this collection (derived from a three-volume set shown in the TV show) that contains 1,775 poems and fragments. I finally have one source I can keep at hand to read favorites as well as poems I’ve never seen before. I’m sure like many writers and artists before me, I’ll get lots of inspiration.

Mood: Monday

This work is in the public domain.

Wheatfield with Crows, © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
oil on canvas, 1890
Vincent Van Gogh, Netherlands

From the museum’s website:
Wheatfield with Crows is one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings. It is often claimed that this was his very last work. The menacing sky, the crows and the dead-end path are said to refer to the end of his life approaching. But that is just a persistent myth. In fact, he made several other works after this one.

Van Gogh did want his wheatfields under stormy skies to express ‘sadness, extreme loneliness’, but at the same time he wanted to show what he considered ‘healthy and fortifying about the countryside’.

Van Gogh used powerful colour combinations in this painting: the blue sky contrasts with the yellow-orange wheat, while the red of the path is intensified by the green bands of grass.

I picked this today because of something I’m planning to write. I imagined a scene over a year ago with no thought of this painting. But once the painting came up in today’s searches, I can see it’s the perfect inspiration.