Vincent’s Secret StudentsThe secret of the painting is this: it is what I saw.
This wasn't some exaggeration of a starry night sky born of madness or imagination or overpowering emotion...though I cannot claim to have been a stranger to any of these. It was not an attempt to portray an underlying truth or essential beauty invisible to the naked eye. It was neither a hallucination nor a dreamscape nor a symbolic distortion.
It is what I saw the night the Notfolk left me.
They of the gentle, gliding grace and piping voices. Heads like top hats, bulging eyes rolling around the brims. Great walrus mustaches draping over the lower half of their faces. Bodies long and dark and slender as topcoats touching the floor, showing no trace of shoetips.
They had been coming to me for years, ap
