Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ inspires Bosnian park

Agencies | Visoko, Bosnia And Herzegovina

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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.