Do you see nights as ordinary nights or do you see something deeper?
Many painters— impressionists, specifically— and writers have depicted landscapes in night time before, but not like Vincent Van Gogh. His masterpiece, “Starry Night,” which was created in 1889 in an asylum in St-Rémy-de-Provence wraps up in one post-impressionist oil painting the tumultuous emotions, aspirations, astronomical interests, and philosophy of a mentally troubled man.
The first salient feature of this surreal work is the spirals that dominate the nightsky, particularly surrounding the stars and the crescent moon that are very luminous yet fail to illuminate the dark village below. Although some people claim that these curvilinear patterns made through thick brush strokes are dizzying, I think they guide the viewer smoothly with its river-like flowing motion into the entirety of the painting.
The prominence of dark blue, green, and black evokes a sense of melancholy and quietude that are broken by swirls of white, yellow, and mint green in the haloes of the stars and moon, and the comforting brightness of windows in the houses. The church spire towering the townhouses suggests isolation and presumably the painter's desperate desire for religion.
In the left foreground, a thick, curving cypress tree, probably the most important figure in the painting, connotes death and bridges the other half of the artwork. The turbulence of the sky and the calming peace of the village seem to combine harmonically to symbolize life and death; Gogh himself was appalled by Leo Tolstoy's My Religion's disbelief in resurrection, a major theme of Gogh's work, as evidenced by the spire and the cypress tree's pointing to heaven.
The fluid contours of “Starry Night” are something a viewer wouldn't forget. While Gogh fought his illness, he made a memorabilia that would be talked about and praised for centuries.
Comments
Post a Comment