Science  Write  Now

A fervent and unempathetic wind, the mistral is a seasonal resident of Provence in southern France. Blowing in from the northwest in winter and spring, it empties rowdiness into the Gulf of Lion in the Mediterranean. Citizens of Provence cop sustained winds of thirty to sixty kilometres per hour for days, weeks and months, with speeds peaking at 185 kilometres per hour. No wonder Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo of painted landscapes, ‘I always have to struggle against the mistral, which absolutely prevents one being in control of one’s touch.’[1] Does that mean much of Van Gogh’s finest art was not what he had hoped it would be, due to uncompromising wind? All that un-tameability, the thick, quick, heavy-handed strokes that swish a layered wheatfield and vibrate distant mountain trees and swirl clouds, swirl even air —what would his paintings be without it? Many speculate his style is a response to poor mental health, but maybe it’s mere meteorology. Understanding how chronic illness responds to the environment, having lived experience, I’d say it’s both.

For years my acupuncturist has treated me for excess wind or, in Western terms, Ménière’s disease. She calls the fullness of my inner ear and subsequent vertigo ‘trapped wind’. On desperate visits to her, I call it ‘trapped mistral’. My acupuncturist knows, and I know, that wind is never useful unless it’s free to flow, so she pushes needles into my pressure points. She wants to stop my body from trapping wind, while my aim is to trap the wind in words.

There are other winds as powerful as the mistral in other parts of the world. Canada’s chinook, the khamsin of North Africa and the helm of northern England are all kin to the mistral. In writing about the Santa Ana in Southern California—which is typically a foehn, as found in Austria and Switzerland – Joan Didion writes, ‘The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.’[2] This is because highly concentrated wind disturbs us both physiologically and psychologically. There’s a likelihood of greater secretion of serotonin in the body  during fierce winds, and because the function is linked to the nervous system this means elevated levels of anxiety, irritability and, for some, mania.[3] There can be an increase in allergies and headaches, and in parts of Europe, the national weather service warns doctors and medical facilities, and the public, about area-specific advisories so that those with arthritis are prepared, those with respiratory conditions, those with migraine, with vertigo, with depression.[4] In some parts of the world where mistral-type winds are taken seriously, you’re likely to be given a shorter sentence if you commit a crime during their windy season.[5]

Wind equates to resistance and upheaval, which is why when I write, We don’t see wind, only what it creates, I am saying we need objects in opposition to wind to understand the essence of it. Once we had two blackouts in twenty-four hours, the wind so destructive we also had a flying trampoline: object in opposition. That day the wind exhaled broadly, for hours, which I’ve been known to do, like when I’ve just about reached my limit and I’ve had it with illness. That day, land was in opposition to the wind (as I sometimes am), Mother Nature leaning in with her wild-hair tresses snagging the branches, her grass rolling over itself and building fresh mounds, her clouds giving birth then flying away. It was so solidly dishevelled—as I sometimes am—that I nearly cried for having witnessed it. It’s how I felt when I saw Thatched Cottages at Cordeville at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and in fact I returned to the day of the blackouts when I stood in front of the painting: Van Gogh’s green swathing the canvas in sloping dimensions, a spilling of foliage, a bounty of wildness all in a rural yard. I thought of what it feels like to have wind inside me and to experience vertigo, and when I looked at me (the painting), really looked at it (me), I understood that it’s the very notion of wind that made Van Gogh’s world sing.

When I think of songs referencing wind, I think of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin in the Wind”, Kansas’s “All we are is Dust in the Wind” and Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath my Wings”. None of the lyrics to these songs try to capture wind, only to work with it as metaphor. “Wind Beneath my Wings” caters to the concept that a bird will find it easier to fly if its wings catch the wind. I can picture the video for the song now, the Devine Ms M fluttering her fingers and hands as she sings fly – fly – fly high against the sky, so high I almost touch the sky, a metaphor for the two protagonists in the movie Beaches, who are lifelong best friends. The metaphor is overdone, much like rhyming ‘sky’ with ‘sky’, but I like thinking about a bird’s wing catching wind. I don’t think a bird can capture wind, mind you, because I think ‘catch’ and ‘capture’ are two different verbs, but I think it can be the other way around. I think wind can capture a bird. Since I imagine it would involve great surprise and drama, and most likely end in death, I hope I don’t ever see it. 

In another letter to Theo, Van Gogh says this:

"I wouldn’t be surprised if you liked the starry night and the ploughed fields— they’re calmer than some other canvases. If the work always went like that I’d have fewer worries about money, because people would come to it more easily if the technique continued to be more harmonious. But this bloody mistral is a real nuisance for doing brushstrokes that hold together and intertwine well, with feeling, like a piece of music played with emotion."[6]

One of German-born American artist Hans Hofmann’s darkest and deepest paintings is titled The Wind. So often pitting primary colours in his shapes and working with the bold and garishly slanted—red screeching to a halt with yellow, green bumping against orange after sharing a line of coke, orange and blue egotistically staring each other down—The Wind is a departure into a minimalism of sorts. Hofmann works with three colours, if you’re the type of person to consider black and white colours, which I am, so I will, only I’ll give them a descriptor first: shadowy black and fallen white with mesmeric blue.

When you look at The Wind, it’s improbable to reckon with critics who compare Hofmann’s use of colour with that of Van Gogh’s and therefore insist Van Gogh is one of Hofmann’s greatest influences, alongside Matisse. But then Matisse had Woman with Dark Hair and Van Gogh had The Potato Eaters, and how are those paintings in their bruised tones representative of their styles in any way? 

When I think about The Potato Eaters within the context of Van Gogh’s work, its blackened browns and grey whites of the peasants’ surrounds and their clothing and their faces, I think of the artist not yet having found his true home, Provence, where he discovered light and devoted himself to it and where light filtered itself through his eyes and his paintbrush, from oil to canvas. But now I am projecting the mythology of the painter’s life onto one of his paintings: why should anyone think Provence was a spiritual home to Van Gogh if it’s also where he sank most deeply into his hellish sickness? Still, The Potato Eaters is fascinating for being what it is not, and that is, primarily, colourful.

So what was wind to Hofmann then, the painting a wild and menacing scribbled mess of cheerlessness in midnight blue, black and beach-sand brown? Was it something more slippery than the themes of his other paintings? More elusive than a song of a nightingale? More unfathomable than two combinable walls? Was it something he grappled with more than a conjurer or a yellow table? Because those paintings all made use of yellow against green, with pinks, purples and oranges; they’re bright and bold in basic, sure shapes. Why, for Hofmann, did an attempt to capture wind mean breaking with the style he’s best known for?

The Wind is a controversial topic for those who believe it influenced Jackson Pollock’s iconic paint practices and those who believe Pollock is a supreme innovator of Abstract Expressionism’s most daring technique. Though influential in the movement, Hofmann is not regarded as revolutionary; Pollock is. And surely Pollock would have felt this way, his ego being what it was, because when Hans Hofmann first met him at his studio, or so Lee Krasner’s story goes, and didn’t see any portraits and still-lifes, he asked Pollock, ‘Do you work from nature?’ and Pollock responded, ‘I am nature.’[7]

Unlike Hofmann, Pollock never painted wind, and why would he if he was wind?

Wanting to see how nature painted, Richard Taylor, as a student at the Manchester School of Art, constructed a pendulum that splattered paint at the speed and direction of wind, which reminded him of Pollock (not Hofmann). So, years later, when Taylor was working as a nano-electrician, he discovered that fractals found in nature reminded him of Pollock’s paintings, so he measured the paint as he would measure electrical currents, and said yes![8] Pollock painted fractals in the 1950s when they hadn’t even been discovered until the mid-70s. 

If I try to imagine what a single particle taken from a fractal of the wind might look like, I envisage American sculptor Anthony Howe’s ‘Oblongata Interior’, a simple, blue, chandelier-type sculpture in which each arm begins its rotation only slightly after the preceding one. Its movement is fluid, like that of an octopus, though ‘Oblongata Interior’ has nothing to do with water and everything to do with wind, since it’s wind that actually moves it. Plus, there are no fractals found in wind, only in clouds that are moved by wind (or wheatfields, or cypresses) because we cannot see wind, only what it creates, and we can see the fractals of cloud. 

Fractal-like pattern-making is important to many visual artists’ work and has informed many art movements. Think of the algorithmic art of the eighties so often seen in dayglo posters, or of thirteenth century Islamic mosaics, or tapestries from India dating back eight thousand years. Fashion designer Iris van Herpen carries on the tradition today. Her work is considered posthuman. 

In a posthuman world there is denial of the singular, an erasure of ego, an evolution of non-dualism as human and non-human become entirely interdependent on one another.[9] In a posthuman world, art, fashion and technology merge. Van Herpen creates Haute Couture that embodies nature and technology for the runways and the galleries. Her dresses are three-dimensional, pulsing and throbbing in breezy movement, an astonishing effect derived from a 3-D printer and plotter-cutting, with thousands of interconnected .8mm-thick waves. The satin dresses are movement, they are technology, they are architecture, they are organza and stainless steel. At her atelier in Amsterdam (four and a half kilometres north of the Van Gogh Museum) Van Herpen creates dresses that simulate patterns found in nature, which translates to imitating patterns shaped by wind: water, fire, clouds. Artists like Bjork and Lady Gaga wear her clothes and have been known to shock at awards shows, proving a posthuman aesthetic gets the paparazzi’s attention. 

Van Herpen showcased her Hypnosis collection at Élysée Montmarte in Paris in July 2019, each model a sculpture walking through a larger Anthony Howe sculpture. Howe is a lapsed painter turned sculptor who now solely works with wind: ‘I was bored with everything being static in my visual world. I wanted to see stuff flow.’[10] His kinetic sculptures find their purpose in fifty-knot wind, in twenty-five knots, in one, and they begin with a computer. From screen to hand, the measuring is exact, the metalwork heavy and lengthy, and the end result is continuous motion, a work of art that mimics nature.     

For Van Herpen’s Hypnosis show, Howe created ‘Omniverse’, a portal for the models to enter through. At times it’s a cephalopod-seeming, urchin-like, silver non-human sculpted form eating itself and regurgitating to eat itself again, but then it is also endless drops of water becoming a single big splash becoming the very centre of a ripple, all of this revolving, endlessly. Howe works with expansion and contraction, with the hypnotic, and in Hypnosis, as the showstopping finale, Van Herpen mirrors his ‘Omniverse’ with ‘Infinity’, a dress of feathers with sculpted feathered wings in which the wings are reliant on wind in the same way the tendrils of the ‘Omniverse’ are. Model morphs with bird, and bird-model works the runway in ambulatory, posthuman flight. Wind catching wing.

Whether loved, hated or tolerated, to embrace Provence is to embrace the mistral, and in embracing the mistral, Vincent van Gogh, despite having written to Theo, ‘it’s very bad for work’,[11] painted en plein air, using ropes and thick iron pegs to secure his easel. Did he set out each morning to capture wind, or did the wind capture him?

Photographer Rachel Cobb spent twenty years trying to capture the mistral, her efforts culminating in the pictorial book Mistral: The Legendary Wind of Provence. In one photo, a cloud stretches itself to look like a dinosaur, its neck a vertical funnel of wind, its tail a horizontal one. In another it is risen and whipped snow, this time shaped like a sitting camel.   There are birds that fill the sky in ecstatic numbers—one can almost hear the heightened cacophony of their flight on the rollicking airstream. A man is lifted from the sand in another photo, what looks to be metres high, as he holds onto the controls of a kite. His body is twisted, the wind overpowering his take on bio-aerodynamics. In others, a boy holds his face still with two hands, a bride’s veil makes itself into a perfect cloud, a cloud is a pink apostrophe, and maybe after that last photo was taken, the apostrophe turned into ellipses. Of course Cobb also photographs wheat: wheat bowing and wheat blurred: Van Gogh wheat. 

The mistral brings sunshine and lucidity of light as it blows away what tends to linger in the sky—whisps of cloud drift, dust and industrial smoke – which might explain why Cobb’s photographs are so precise. During the mistral, one can see mountains as far as one hundred and fifty kilometres away.

Van Gogh said in one of his letters to his sister Willemien, 

"What strikes me here and what makes painting here attractive to me is the clarity of the air, you can’t know what that is because it’s precisely what we don’t have at home—but at an hour’s distance one can make out the colour of things, the grey-green of olive trees and the grass green of the meadow, for instance, and the pink-lilac of ploughed land; at home we see a vague grey line on the horizon; here the line is sharp and the shape recognizable from far, far away. This gives an idea of space and air."[12]

Like the mistral does with clouds, dust, and pollution, the term ‘winds of change’ means to bring in the new, sweep out the old. ‘I’m going to work some more outside,’ Vincent wrote to Theo from Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, ‘the mistral’s blowing. It usually dies down by the time the sun’s about to set, then there are superb effects of pale citron skies, and desolate pines cast their silhouettes into relief against it with effects of exquisite black lace.’[13] What a helpful wind the mistral is, sitting proudly in the adage that change is good, regardless of the fact that it’s a dry wind, a drying wind that parches stagnant water and moisture, dehydrating the land and blowing so fiercely fires become a deadly issue. It’s why they’re called ‘mange-fange’ or ‘mud-eaters’. In Australia we have the brickfielder, a wind so hot and dry coming from the northern desert that it turns the soil hard as bricks. Like the Santa Ana wind, our brickfielder tempts fire, seduces fire, fucks fire raw then smokes a cigarette after.     

In the summer of 2019-2020, fires raged across Australia as the relentless hot wind puffed out its chest and beat it to bursting. Twenty-four million hectares burnt, three thousand homes destroyed, three billion animals displaced or killed. Thirty-three people died directly from fire, including two firefighters whose helicopters collided, including two people I knew: my friend and his father running from what they could not outrun. A further four hundred and fifty-five more people died from the smoke of what’s called the Black Summer fires, and who knows how many are yet to make the number rise.[14]

In that festive season, rarely was a conversation begun without the word ‘fire’. Everyone I saw throughout January had the same fallen face due to exhaustion or worry, and we were seeing the brighter side of it. I didn’t see the faces of those fighting fire, who were rather busy, so no, not all change is good, and the photos my friends and I took of one another as we tried to toast a new year that had signalled death, destruction and devastation, are proof, our eyes bloodshot red.

I was dizzy that fire season. Like the brickfielder that devastated the country, my internal wind was strong. It was heat from rising liver yang, as my acupuncturist puts it, the liver being linked to my Ménière’s disease and the heat being dangerous. I am not a sceptic of climate change. I’m a known casualty. And things with the climate, things with me, can only get worse.

High-speed winds lean toward barometric changes, and biometeorology tells us atmospheric pressure changes affect the body.[15] So maybe it’s not the wind but the air molecules capturing the wind that influence blood pressure, sinuses and breathing, shape pain levels and vertigo, increase risk of heart attack and sudden infant death syndrome, account for an increase in hospital admissions for women giving birth, raise the rate of suicide. Some biometeorologists believe the connection between air pressure and bodies is evolutional, a way of keeping humans in sync with their ecosystem, the wind its catalyst.[16]

I’ve written poems about illness that interchange barometric pressure changes and wind because my illness is wind, and barometric pressure changes are my biggest trigger. One poem is called ‘Barometric Pressure Change’ and in fifteen lines it manages to use the word ‘wind’ ten times:

When wind is at its almightiest, repetition rules. David Hockney worked on this idea in his 1973 Weather Series, a survey of sun, rain, snow, mist, lightning and wind. As trademark to his style, the paintings apply a geometry of distinct lines that work to produce a distilled moment, so that motion is held. Even in his swimming pool paintings, the emphasis isn’t on the rippling water or the big splash. It’s on straight lines. 

Sun is a strict portrayal of a pot plant lavishing the sun’s yellow rays in a background of bright blue shutters. In brilliant hues, the painting makes use of apparent lines and angles; there’s clear direction. Rain, too, works in sharp cutting-through lines, this time as the rain diagonally and repetitively dissects circles of puddles that drip. Everything but the rain is blue. Snow’s lines slope in the soft mountains’ white blanket, yet they are no less malleable than the lines of Sun and Rain. Mists’s lines are in the slanting perspective of three silhouetted palm trees smothered by pink, choking on hazy swirls. It’s an invisible line, but a strong line nonetheless. In Lightning, the bolt is double-sided, dynamically exact, central to the frame, splicing hundreds of thin lines moving top right to bottom left, everything grey and victimised. Wind is the only painting without exact lines.

In Wind, four illustrated pieces of paper are caught in their own personal draughts in a watery aqua sky. The small papers are flappable, leaning and bending and dancing in the wind. They are replicas of Sun, Rain, Snow and Mist – Lightning must’ve blown away. 

Clearly Hockney was interested in more than the energy-laden representation of the painting’s namesake; he was interested in the reproduction of images, of the way art repeats itself, absorbs itself and keeps showing up, just as wind does in its most insistent moments. 

Van Gogh wrote of a ‘pitiless mistral’,[18] a ‘merciless mistral that sweeps the dead leaves with fury’,[19] ‘a very violent mistral’[20] ‘a nasty mistral’,[21] ‘a nasty mistral’,[22] ‘a very nasty, nagging wind’.[23] It was winter, mistral season, when he threatened Gauguin with a razor then proceeded to slice off a portion of his own ear. The wind would have been blowing that day and the days leading up to that day, a more than repetitive wind, an incessant wind, and Van Gogh belonged to an elite, sensitive group of people who suffer from physical and / or mental illness and therefore feel affected by the wind, the chaos of it entering into their bodies and minds: the mother chucker wind, the mother chucker wind, the nasty, nasty mistral wind. 

The name ‘mistral’ means ‘masterly’ in Provençal, lending import and majesty to the renowned wind of the region, and to the name of the region’s Nobel Prize-winning poet, Frédéric Mistral. Mistral’s most famous work, Mireille, was written in Provençal, at the time an ever-fading Romance language. Van Gogh wrote to Theo about the book and said it was difficult to read because of the Provençal, but he persisted in small ways: ‘I can tell you this, that the original language from here in words sounds so musical in the mouths of the Arlésiennes that my word yes, from time to time I catch fragments of it.’ Van Gogh was an avid reader, which makes sense, art feeding into art as it does.

Alphonse Daudet, Mistral’s lifelong friend, eulogized him in ‘Poet Mistral’, one of the musings in his Letters from My Windmill, a book of nostalgic stories about Daudet’s time in Provence, the region’s people and surrounds. He writes:

"Whilst Mistral spoke his verses in this beautiful Provençal tongue, more than three quarters Latin, and once spoken by queens, and now only understood by shepherds, I was admiring this man, and considering the ruinous state in which he found his mother tongue and what he had done with it."[24]

It’s as if Mistral, too, was also adhering to the art feeding into art concept, if you consider speaking a dying language an artform. Which I do. 

Mistral dedicated the book to another friend of his named Alphonse, the poet de Lamartine: ‘To you, I dedicate Mireille: It is my heart and my soul; It is the flower of my years; It is bunch of grapes from La Crau, leaves and all, a peasant's offering.’[25] The cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Mireille uses a replication of Van Gogh’s Harvest at La Crau. There appears to be no certainty of wind in the painting, the strokes straight and the sky a hazy mountain air—there appears to be no mistral, except in the author’s name. 

Writer and essayist Eula Biss says, ‘Wind, like pain, is difficult to capture. The poor windsock is always striving, and always falling short.’[26] A windsock, which is not art (but perhaps those who craft them would say differently), constantly captures wind, but in this essay by Biss, called ‘The Pain Scale’, it does not. This confuses me because, as a skydiver, I’d found myself heavily dependent on windsocks, jump after jump, year after year, and windsocks never fell short. If I hurt myself on landing, if there was real pain, the windsock said ‘I told you so’ and I held my head in shame.

When I was diagnosed with Ménière’s disease, I stopped jumping. Feeling as though my body had captured wind (even though art cannot capture wind and I do believe my body is art), I was at such odds with a limp windsock that I no longer knew what to trust. Quitting skydiving was an obvious choice; I’d lost control of my parachute, otherwise known as a bird’s wing. 

Wind is so often linked with losing control. Take Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka and his affair with Alma Mahler; the widowed wife of celebrated composer Gustav Mahler. Though Mahler became Kokoschka’s lover, her feelings were muted in comparison to his extreme obsession, one that led him to paint hundreds of her portraits. It was said that the creative energy Kokoschka took from Alma Mahler is what drew her to him, and that his idealisation repelled her. Such to the extent that when he proposed marriage she stalled by telling him she’d only say yes if he painted a masterpiece. Being his true muse, if Kokoschka was going to create a masterpiece he would have to paint Alma, Alma, Alma, Alma, Alma. 

He began by measuring her bed, sacred space of clinging nights, fixation turned to flesh. He then cut the canvas to its size—a massive 180cm x 221cm— and went to work. The bed became a safety vessel for the two at sea, a life raft in giant shell-frame amid tempestuous wind and raging waves. Alma sleeps soundly in the painting on Oskar’s chest while he lies awake, stiff, wide-eyed, his fingers worrying themselves. The painting—indeed a masterpiece—is called The Bride of the Wind, and if Mahler is the bride and Kokoschka is the wind, then he is tumult as much as he is husband. Kokoschka, therefore, captures wind in metaphor, like Bette Midler, which is different from capturing wind in form, like a windsock. 

There’s a sculptor named Janet Echelman who creates net-like windsocks—enormous, fibrous sculptures that capture wind but at the same time always let it pass through. In essence she’s working with it, which is much better than opposing it. She says, 

"I’m interested in the empty spaces between things, interstitial spaces, because we don’t even notice them; they become invisible, and when I bring a thread from one building to another, suddenly we are seeing that empty space in a different way. When you encounter one of my sculptures, this monumental softness moving in the wind, it reminds us that the wind is already there, it’s as if the wind is the choreographer, and I love that I have no control over it."[27]

Like Anthony Howe, Echelman is a lapsed painter, too. The switch in artform for her began when she found herself in India on a Fulbright scholarship without any paints. She roamed its shores, watching the fishermen and their nets, and she fulfilled her Fulbright obligations as sculptor, never looking back. 

While she was at Harvard she wrote a paper about Henri Matisse. Art scholars believe among Matisse’s biggest influences is Vincent van Gogh so, in degrees of separation, Janet Echelman would have to count Van Gogh as a major influence. As in his paintings, wind is what makes her art sing.

Van Gogh was influenced by the writer Alphonse Daudet, who published Letters from My Windmill in 1869. The title comes from the Moulin Ribet, also known as Moulin Saint-Pierre, now known as the Moulin de Daudet, or ‘Windmill of Daudet’. Van Gogh drew the windmill in ink, painted it in watercolour, called it The Mill of Alphonse Daudet at Fontevieille, another example of art feeding into art. He repeatedly wrote of Daudet in his letters, his admiration evident.[28] At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Eugène Carrière’s 1893 lithograph of Alphonse Daudet hangs as homage, an ethereal portrait of the writer. 

In describing the windmill that Van Gogh would end up painting his favourite colour yellow, Daudet had written: 

"A ruin; a crumbling debris of stones and old planks, which hadn’t been windblown for years and which was lying, useless as a poet, while all around on the coast the milling industry flourished and spread its wings."[29]

Useless as a poet, or any writer, or any artist, trying to capture illness (wind). 

Because Van Gogh preferred drawing to painting when working outdoors during the mistral (it’s said he loved the reeds that grew along the canals of Arles because they made for superior drawing pens), and because The Mill of Alphonse Daudet at Fontevieille is, at its core, an ink drawing, it’s likely he drew it in the mistral. I can’t help but imagine him seated in front of the windmill, the wildness of the weather, how the windmill would’ve blown that day if its blades had been intact, spinning in order to grind the wheat in its time of great production. How would Van Gogh have captured the movement and the pace of it? How would he have tried to capture the wind? Quick brushstrokes creating frantic movement and swirls in everything surrounding the windmill, most likely, much as he did in his wheatfields, his air currents and the tree branches of cypresses. He was always painting wind, and possibly illness, though I think the two might be the same. 

(1) Van Gogh Museum. http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let656/letter.html Accessed 18 April 2021

(2) Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. (1968) 4th Estate Paperback edition ed. London: HarperCollins, 2017 (p217)

(3)  Sullivan, Walter. ‘Ions Created By Winds May Prompt Changes In Emotional States’

(4) New York Times. 6 Oct 1981. IONS CREATED BY WINDS MAY PROMPT CHANGES IN EMOTIONAL STATES - The New York Times Accessed 15 May 2021.

(5) Hoffmann, Jan. ‘Santa Ana Winds: A Cruel Blow’ The Los Angeles Times. 16 Nov 1989  The Santa Ana Winds: A Cruel Blow - Los Angeles Times Accessed 15 May 2021.

(6)  Van Gogh Museum. http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let691/letter.html  Accessed 18 April 2021

 Hans Hofmann. https://www.hanshofmann.org/1940-1949 Accessed 2 May 2021

(8)  Williams, Florence. ‘Feel-good fractals: from ocean waves to Jackson Pollock’s art.’ Aeon. https://aeon.co/ideas/feel-good-fractals-from-ocean-waves-to-jackson-pollocks-art Accessed 2 May 2021.

(9)  Ferrando, Francesca. ‘Posthumanism.’  Tidsskrift for kjønnsforskning , August 2014 tfk-2014-2Ferrando.pdf Accessed 4 May 2021

(10)  Anthony Howe. https://www.howeart.net/ Accessed 4 May 2021

(11)  Van Gogh Museum. http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let699/letter.html Accessed 18 April 2021 

(12)  ibid. http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let626/letter.html Accessed 18 April 2021  

(13) ibid. http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let829/letter.html Accessed 18 April 2021 

(14) Slezak, Michael. ‘3 billion animals killed or displaced in Black Summer bushfires, study estimates.’ ABC News.  28 July 2020.

(15)  Horowitz, Sala. ‘Biometeorology: What It Is and How It Affects Our Health.’ Alternative and Complementary Therapies, vol 8, no 1, February 2002, p 34-39, http://www.sld.cu/galerias/pdf/p34_s.pdf  Accessed 28 April 2021

 (16) ‘Wind’s Psychological Impact: Exploring the Mental Effects of Gusty Weather.’ NeuroLaunch. 12 Sept 2024 Wind's Psychological Impact: Mental Effects of Gusty Weather Accessed 14 Jan 2024.

(17)  Taylor Johnson, Heather. ‘Barometric Pressure Change.’ Australian Poetry Journal, vol 9, no 2, 2019, pg 96.

(18)  Van Gogh Museum. http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let699/letter.html Accessed 18 April 2021 

(19)  ibid  http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let699/letter.html  Accessed 18 April 2021

(20)  ibid  http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let704/letter.html  Accessed 18 April 2021

(21)  ibid  http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let680/letter.html  Accessed 18 April 2021

(22)  ibid http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let696/letter.html   Accessed 18 April 2021

(23)  ibid. http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let653/letter.html  Accessed 18 April 2021

(24)  Daudet, Alphonse. Letters from My Windmill. (1869) Trans Frederick Davies, 1978. Revised ed 

1984. Penguin, England. (p 183)

(25)  Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir%C3%A8io Accessed 26 April 2021

(26)  Biss, Eula. ‘The Pain Scale’. Seneca Review. Vol. 35, issue 1. 2005. (5-25)

(27) ‘Janet Echelman: Breaking Down Boundaries with Art.’ Youtube. Uploaded by Adobe Creative Cloud, 16 February 2017. Accessed 10 May 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3rIW9nJw3Y Accessed 4 May 2021

(28) Van Gogh Museum. http://vangoghletters.org Accessed 18 April 2021 

(29) Daudet, Alphonse. Letters from My Windmill. (1869) Trans Frederick Davies, 1978. Revised ed 1984. Penguin, England.