Light And Colour In The Starry Night

The starry night is a painting that was made by Vincent van Gogh. It’s a landscape painting made in June of 1889. It’s an oil painting on a canvas that he painted while in an asylum after he had a breakdown in 1888. He painted the starry night while he inside of the asylum that he voluntarily went to. The starry night is one of many versions of the paintings he made. He made many paintings of the view from his room in the asylum in different weather. Each painting was of the same view however van Gogh managed to make each painting different from each other and they each were unique in their own separate ways.

Color seems very important to Van Gogh. He put a big emphasis on the light emitting from the houses on the waterfront. I find it interesting that the stars

The tone used in Vincent’s painting were a mixed of warm and cool colours to convey his emotions. In order to achieve the dramatic mood of this painting, Vincent used white and yellow oil paints, which marries well with the blue and green to create the night sky.

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.

When I first saw Vincent van Gogh’s painting of The Starry Night, I was immediately drawn to the peaceful luminescent stars emanating outward like vibrant yellow halos into the captivating striking blue sky. I felt a sense of calm and tranquility as the bright orange moon shone intently over the serene village below. The sprawling mountain range, grassy hills and fields of wheat intensified this feeling as a soft wind swept through the countryside. Under the immense stars and vibrant night sky, the people of the village sleep soundly in their cottages. This painting exudes an overwhelming feeling of calmness and peace in my mind.

One of the most mysterious and thought-provoking images to date was painted in 1889 from a mental health institution in St. Remy, France by non-other than Vincent Van Gogh. The opulence of blues and yellows has the ability bring a viewer to its knees, mostly in a subconscious manner that evokes a kind of spiritual quest, perhaps one that Van Gogh was on himself. The Starry Night is still heavily contemplated and its meaning is still relatively unknown and quite debated, as is the man himself. In an effort to gain an understanding of not only the painting but the painter himself, I chose two articles that provide an understanding of the art and the artist: Van Gogh’s Agony by Lauren Soth and Under the Starry Night by Denis J. Billy. Both writers take a different approach to grasping the elusive understanding of this wondrous work but occasionally find some similarities and understanding of him and his work, which I will elaborate on through the course of this paper.

The Starry Night are one of Vincent Van Gogh's most famous paintings. The Starry Night was painted from a memory that he had. And wasn't painted from a landscape. The landscape was formed using curves and forms of short lines he also used a form of swirling lines and texture. He used blue, white, and yellow lines to paint the piece. And it became one of his most famous pieces of art. He finished the art piece in 1889.

In this response paper the event will be over Vincent Van Gogh. We went over a presentation of him. The presentation was in Art Appreciation Class at RSU. We watched a YouTube video about the starry night song and pictures of his paintings. In the music video by Don McLean Starry Starry night he sings about Van Gogh’s life.

The grass contains mostly vertical and diagonal brushstrokes that give an action to suggest wind coming off the water just barely visible behind the plants. The viewers gaze towards the water leads us up to mountain ranges that lead the eye skyward along with the interesting repetition of the clouds above the mountains. Every color used for an item, such as the grass or cypress tree, has an overlaying of highlights that interests the viewer. It is in the fact that an orange or a green has not just that solid color, but also blues and greens that hide in the orange along with the yellows and pinks that hide within the green. The concept of overlaying colors upon another gives depth through shadow and highlight illusions and Van Gogh does this brilliantly here in this painting. Although the Starry Night is considered the masterpiece and has a fame noted to all, this painting, The Cypress and the Star, has a quality that seemed to grow from Van Goh’s past artwork and has many interesting comparisons to the Starry

“The Starry Night" was created in 1889 during the post-impressionistic period which was a time in which artists used symbolism and color to expressed their feelings and psychological well being (MOMA Learning, n.d.). Additionally, this was also a time in

Before starting my research into van Gogh. I knew as much as the ordinary person would about him. His artwork is so renowned in the world that generally everyone has an idea of who he was and I shared that understanding. Whenever someone talks about post-impressionism van Gogh’s name is always mentioned. Before my research, I knew two of his works, one, a self-portrait (1887) , which is one of over thirty portraits he painted between 1886 and 1889. The second artwork is the famous ‘The Starry Night’ , which I first discovered by looking at a teapot my mother owns which has the painting on it. I remember it catching my eye because of the way van Gogh was able to capture light and the way he created movement in the sky through the use of swirls but I hadn’t taken my interest in his work any further.

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,

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.

     With its swirling colors and lines, The Starry Night, incorporates not just the color and light that is found in the earlier works of these painters, but it shows how forms and feelings also came into play. One of van Gogh’s main beliefs was that art was a direct representation of how the artist feels. Having grown up in a very religious family, van Gogh viewed the heavens as a beautiful, living thing. His heavy brushstrokes and vivid colors portray the night sky as crazy and chaotic and the village below as peaceful and serene. Van Gogh’s troubled life, which involved many failures in life, love and business, forced him into madness, which eventually caused him to commit suicide. While the problems of his life may have caused personal trauma, the artistic importance of his insanity is overwhelming. Perhaps if he had not gone crazy, he never would have created the masterpieces that have had such an impact on art and history.

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.