Comparing Nature Methaphors In The Battle Of Issus And Starry Night

For this essay, I chose to compare and contrast Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” with Marc Chagall’s “I and the Village”. The two pieces are lovely and most interesting to evaluate in relationship to one another. I personally love both artists and upon closely examining these famous pieces, I have noticed how similar yet different these works of art are.

Vincent Van Gogh is one of the most infamous and influential artists of all time. When I saw that Van Gogh’s painting “Olive Trees With Yellow Sky and Sun” was on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, I knew I had to choose it for this paper. Before doing the research for this assignment, I didn’t know much about Vincent Van Gogh, but the fact that pretty much everyone knows his name and recognizes him as a huge part of art history, it made me naturally really curious about him.

This painting tells a sad story about a general who is willing to die for his citizens. This story also tells a hopeful story about unity between two completely different civilizations.

Van Gogh got excited over the look of these trees and painted them. Some of his paintings of the trees represented life, others represented how he felt about Christ in Gethsemane, and others represented a combination of both of these things. An example of an art piece that had a lot to do with religion was Olive Trees with Alpilles in the Background (Fig. 6). This piece was painted with Christ in Gethsemane in mind. He wanted to create a piece that used a more purer and serence sense of nature without using religious imagery. With this piece “he wanted to show it was possible to paint the meaning of Christ in the Garden of Olives, the garden of Gethsemane where Christ prayed the night before his crucifixion, without aiming straight for the historical Garden of Gethsemane.” Vincent had done religious paintings before, he actually painted Christ in the arden of Olives twice before, but both times he decided not to paint the images of Christ since, as he said in a letter to his brother Theo, he did not want to “do figures of such importance without a model.” Van Gogh actually had begun to avoid doing religious work around this time for both aesthetic and moral reasons. Van Gogh had rejected what he believed to be his parents’ narrow religionious views and went for a much different view, one where life itself almost didn’t seem to matter of have purpose, something close to Nihilism. Vincent instead tried to find meaning in the cycles of nature and how they related to the

When you look at the two paintings; “The Starry Night” by Vincent Van Gogh, and “Number 1 1949” by Jackson Pollock; there are a few similarities about the meaning of the works of art. Their background and history are different. These paintings were created in two totally different eras and have different formal and technical aspects. Saying that, these works of art share no spiritual or moral value. Respectively these paintings have a great history and legacy. Two paintings created in different time periods have little in common but yet so much in common.

Arguably no other artist has captured people's imaginations like Vincent van Gogh. “Vincent van Gogh’s passion, contemplation of life, nature, art, his intensity, his mental illnesses, and his suicide at thirty-seven have all contributed to the powerful myths and love for the estranged artist” (Callow). It is hard to believe that such a beloved painter of today’s society lived such, a short and tortured life. At a young age things, did not start out too well for Vincent. He did not have a very good childhood, and went through many failures in life before he finally found he had an enjoyment for painting. He did not find out that he had a love for painting until he was about twenty-seven years old. Even when he discovered that his calling

Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutch artist from the mid 1800’s who was considered to have created approximately 2000 artworks. Growing up, he was classified to be highly emotional and having low self-esteem. Within those depressed emotions, it helped him pioneer the path of expressionism in his art pieces. But as he got more into him artwork he came more mature with his artwork and caused his color patterns and brush strokes to evolve into another style of art called Impressionism. Starry Night Over the Rhone was one of his last ‘few years’ paintings. It was painted in September of 1888. The canvas resides in Musée d'Orsay,

Soth’s thesis in this paper is essentially that Starry Night is both Van Gogh’s representation of the biblical scene Agony in the Garden -- when Jesus prays to God after the Last Supper acknowledging his impending betrayal-- as well as Van Gogh’s physical agony and nostalgia. He argues that Van Gogh created the piece through a mixture of observation and imagination as a consolation piece for the artist to seek religion through means other than traditional Christian imagery. Carlo Dolci’s version of Agony in the Garden is referenced in particular (311). Soth’s physical

The first work that I am evaluating is "The Starry Night" by Vincent van Gogh which was created in June 1889 and is currently located at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “The Starry Night” was painted during the post-impressionist period, and is one of several that Van Gogh produced while staying at the asylum in Saint-Remy in southern France. According to Soomo Learning (2017) the piece is "a vision of dynamic spiritual movement from temporality to eternity" (Section 2.4.2 Art Gallery). The painting depicts an imagined view of the town of Saint-Remy, with a Dutch style church at the center and rolling hills in the background. It appears to be just before dawn with bright stars, Venus, and the moon set in a vivid blue swirling sky. Contrasting the bright stars and brilliant blue sky is a dark looming cypress tree that occupies the left side of the image and contains a flamelike appearance.

This painting shows how close and codependent humans and nature were. How well humans worked together with one another and their world. How peaceful those that are close to nature are, which is why it (nature) must be celebrated and appreciated.

“Under”). One could mistake that the focal point is the little figure under the birch tree who is a priest. However, the main point in this landscape is all about the birches. The reason why one could say so is because of all the visual elements such as: the birches are in the middle of the painting; they are also the most lighted objects in the painting (light is shining in the form of an oval) (National Gallery). Due to the levels of lightning one can see that the picture is divided into three horizontal parts: the top (dark, but not as dark as the bottom of the painting); the middle is the lightest; and the bottom is the darkest. This means that he used what he learned about the Dutch style and mixed it with his personal style thus we have a whole new way of seeing his point of view.

Vincent Van Gogh was a master of the Post-Impressionist art movement; he created works that conveyed strong emotions through the simplest of elements. In Avenue of Poplars in Autumn, Van Gogh again shows his mastery of brushwork and color, giving the viewer a scene of a person walking from a home near dusk down an avenue lined with spindly poplars. Made in October of 1884, the painting seems to accurately reflect the season with red and brown leaves stubbornly adhering to the trees. The initial feeling of this piece is one of peace and calm. Autumn is a time for being with family and avoiding the cold. But the longer the viewer looks, the more they realize that this painting seems to show the opposite of a serene scene, creating an uneasy atmosphere. The feeling only grows when they see the shadows that lick the edges of the trees, the bar-like ruts in the road, and lone figure that walks steadily away from the empty house. In Avenue of Poplars in Autumn, Van Gogh strives to create a forbidding and frightening atmosphere through dark and contrasting colors, limited space, skewed balance, straight and diagonal lines, movement, and the subject matter of the painting, all to represent his emotional response to the scene.

One of Vincent Van Gogh’s most world renowned paintings is his landscape oil painting Starry Night. The painting displays a small town underneath an unusual yet still extremely beautiful night sky. In this night sky, Van Gogh utilizes an array of colors that blend well together in order to enhance the sky as a whole. The town is clearly a small one due to the amount of buildings that are present in the painting itself. In this small town most of the buildings have lights on which symbolize life in a community. Another visual in Starry Night is the mountain like figures that appear in the background of the illustrious painting. Several things contribute to the beauty of Van Gogh’s painting which are the painting’s function, context, style, and design. Van Gogh’s utilization of these elements help bring further emphasis to his work in Starry Night.

In this piece, John Berger discusses the implications of reproducing images and the changes this brings to the meaning and value of the work. As art became readily reproduced, people began to alter paintings, photographs, and other medium's into new pieces with new meanings. These altered forms of art, often provide insight or commentary into context and meaning of the original pieces. One alteration that Berger mentions, is the addition of text to an image, for example Wheatfield with Crows by Van Gogh. Looking at the painting alone, it appears to be a serene landscape with birds soaring across the skies. Alone, nothing would cause you to question the face value of this piece, however when the words “This is the last picture that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself.” are printed beneath it, it changes the whole experience of viewing the image. Suddenly you notice that Van Gogh's short, aggressive brushstrokes give this painting a tumultuous almost violent feeling. The pathway that leads through the wheat field has no destination, it goes nowhere. We see that the crows roam the skies in a disorganized fashion, it is as if nothing in this painting has a purpose or a plan, everything simply is in chaos. We might ask why crows? Could those birds (so often associated with death and mortality) flying towards us in the painting, signify Van Gogh's feeling that the crows, and what they represent, were coming for him?

Vincent Van Gogh is a well-known artist to people because of one of his paintings, The Starry Night. Van Gogh has painted many other pieces during his lifetime including one that is currently on display at the Minnesota Institute of Art, Olive Trees. This painting is part of a series of olive tree paintings consisting of a total 18 pieces of art. The one at the Minnesota Institute of Art was painted November of 1889 and is known as “Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun”. Through a contextual analysis of this piece a lot can be discovered about its meaning. When this piece is compared to other artwork by Van Gogh even more fascinating details emerge about this piece of art.