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A Vincent Van Gogh aficionado in Bosnia has turned a plot of land into a giant, living reproduction of the painter’s masterpiece, “Starry Night”, composed of thousands of plants.

“Vincent Van Gogh belongs to us too. It’s our heritage and this is a way of paying tribute to him,” Halim Zukic told AFP.

Behind him, tens of thousands of lavender bushes, grasses and other plants form swirls and spirals across a dozen hectares that — seen from the air — unmistakably resemble the celestial configuration painted by the Dutch post-Impressionist master in 1889.

“It wasn’t possible to simply reproduce a flat image on a three-dimensional space,” Zukic said.

“Inspired by the painting, we tried to stick to the shapes and proportions, so that it looks like the painting as much as possible.

“And I think we succeeded.”

The 56-year-old entrepreneur first noticed the land 20 years ago when he was returning from a day out picking mushrooms nearby, in the woods surrounding the village of Luznica in central Bosnia.

He bought the first plot with the idea of building a hut and creating a small, rounded garden.

At the time, he wasn’t even thinking about “Starry Night”, one of the favourite landscapes in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

But the idea just clicked in 2018 when Zukic noticed the tracks left on the lawn by a tractor.

“To my eyes, these tracks looked like spirals from “Starry Night” and it was an immediate decision.”

130,000 lavender plants

The former insurance company owner, who now works in tourism, bought more land and started working it, helped daily by up to 20-30 gardeners.

He declined to say what it cost to complete his labour of love, which took six years to acquire its final shape.

“We planted around 130,000 lavender bushes, tens of thousands of aromatic and medicinal plants, several thousand trees,” he said.

“There isn’t a single straight line in the park — just like in nature.”

At the same time, Zukic became interested in Van Gogh, about whom he knew very little at the time.

Today, Zukic talks animatedly about the painter, his “love of nature” and the “passion with which he did his work”.

In 2023, he travelled to France to visit the places where Van Gogh spent some of his most prolific years — Arles and Saint-Remy-en-Provence.

The artist painted “Starry Night” in June 1889 while he was in a Saint Remy psychiatric hospital.

A year later, he committed suicide, aged 37.

For the time being, only a handful of visitors have had the chance to appreciate Zukic’s park.

The plants and trees still need time to flourish so the public will need a few more months of patience, he said. “Having money is not enough. You need time for a park,” he said. “I’d say we’ve created a good foundation. The park will be more beautiful every year.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

This photo provided by Just Stop Oil shows two protesters who have thrown tinned soup at Vincent Van Gogh’s famous 1888 work Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, Oct. 14, 2022.
| Photo Credit: AP

A pair of paintings by Dutch master Vincent van Gogh at London’s National Gallery were vandalized Friday (September 27, 2024) when a group of climate activists splattered what appeared to be tomato soup on them, shortly after two other activists were sentenced over a similar attack two years ago.

The paintings from Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” series, which the artist painted in Arles in the south of France, were not damaged thanks to protective glass coverings. The gallery identified the two as its own Sunflowers (1888) and Sunflowers (1889) on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Also Read: Climate protestors hurl pea soup at Van Gogh in Rome

“The three activists from the Just Stop Oil environmental group involved in the attack were arrested while the paintings were removed, examined, and then returned to their location. The exhibition reopened later Friday,” the gallery said.

The group posted a video of the attack on social media, showing three people pouring soup over the paintings. The action was apparently in protests against the sentencing earlier Friday of two other activists from the group, Phoebe Plummer, 23, and Anna Holland, 22.

Plummer was sentenced to two years while Holland received a 20-month sentence for their October 2022 attack on a “Sunflowers” painting. The two women threw tins of tomato soup at the artwork, then knelt down in front of it and glued their hands to the wall beneath it. They were found guilty of criminal damage by a jury in July.

In both attacks — in 2022 and on Friday — the activists wore T-shirts supporting Just Stop Oil. The group has been pushing the British government to halt new oil and gas projects and has staged high-profile stunts, including at major sporting events and on Britain’s transport networks.

In Friday’s video, one of the unnamed activists said that future generations will regard them as “prisoners of conscience” who were “on the right side of history.”

In the 2022 attack, the gold-colored frame of Van Gogh’s painting suffered 10,000 pounds ($13,000) worth of damage. At the time, museum staff had worried the soup could have dripped through and caused immeasurable damage to the painting.

In Friday’s sentencing, Judge Christopher Hehir said the artwork could have been “seriously damaged or even destroyed.”

Mr. Hehir was also the judge in the case against Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, another environmental campaigning group, and had sentenced him to five years.

On Friday, he took aim at Plummer. “You clearly think your beliefs give you the right to commit crimes when you feel like it,” he said. “You do not.”

Plummer, who represented herself and who had pleaded guilty, told the hearing that she would accept “with a smile” whatever verdict came her way.

“It is not just myself being sentenced today, or my co-defendants, but the foundations of democracy itself,” she said.

Five days after her guilty verdict in July, Plummer was arrested for spraying paint on departure boards at Heathrow Airport.

Lawyer Raj Chada, defending Holland, said the two women checked that the “Sunflowers” was protected by a glass cover before throwing the soup.