The idea came to me after seeing Vincent van Gogh's "Stars over the River Rhone". I once printed a "magazine" for fun with my home computer called "Astounding Magazine" and in it, this image appears. It shows stars shining over the River Rhone, with the lights of the city reflecting in the river and two figures in the foreground. As far as I was concerned this painting was the most spectacular painting ever painted, and yet there seemed to be for the most part variations of just two colours - Blue and Yellow. This for me was much better than van Gogh's more famous night paintings like "Cafe Terrace at Night" and "The Starry Night". For me this painting explored areas of the human soul that we only see (and forget) when we dream at night. So I wanted to draw a similar Dream without in any way copying van Gogh's painting.
And so, many years ago I decided to stay in the garden at night and paint the Kelani River till morning. The night was infinitely dark and strange, it seemed that everyone had gone to bed, and switched off all the lights. The road was deserted except for a lone cow and the yellowish light of the distant lamp post in the junction showed that the cow was half asleep, but even that was not clear for cows always look like that. A blue-green firefly, very rare for this part of the country flew and disappeared behind a leaf, which made me aware of the garden.
Overhead there were many strange stars. There was a particularly bright reddish star that didn’t twinkle. Could it be Mars, the one they called the red planet, unfortunately, I could not be certain. Then there was another bright star which for some reason I felt was Venus. Unfortunately my knowledge of astronomy, like so much else was incomplete. But it was ok, for didn't Newton himself say: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." All these thoughts made me tired that I sat down in the garden and couldn’t remember anything after that except the ground felt hard on my head, an annoying cricket made an annoying noise, the smell of grass and once I imagined that the cow was in the garden.
The hoot of an alarm made me jump, and for a moment I was horrified to find that I was not in bed but outside at night. I went to the gate to see what made that noise, and found that it was the siren for the midnight shift of a factory. Then I looked up, god how things had changed. Now it was around two in the morning and the stars were brighter than ever. I couldn't see the Great Bear the only constellation I knew apart from Orion, but I could see a group of prominent stars that curled down and formed what looked exactly like a tail. I wondered whether this was the Scorpio constellation and I still do. And then I felt so energetic that I took a canvas and started to paint and the result was the Acrylic painting I have posted below, along with the "Stars over the River Rhone" painting that inspired it.
