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Vincent van gogh starry night essay
Contributions to art through van gogh
Vincent van gogh, the starry night analysis
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“This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” wrote van Gogh to his brother Theo. This letter was used when he was describing his inspiration for one of his best-known paintings, The Starry Night which was created in 1889. The window that he refers to was in the Saint-Paul asylum in Saint-Rémy, in southern France, where he tried to relax away from his emotional suffering while he kept making art. This Starry night painting was created on a medium sized canvas, being 2′ 5″ x 3′ 0″. This oil painting is dominated by a moon and a star-filled night sky. This part of the artwork takes up three-quarters of the picture and appears turbulent, even distressed, with intense swirling patterns that seem to roll across the surface like waves. It is filled with bright orbs, including the crescent moon to the far right, and Venus, the morning star, to the left of center—surrounded by many circles of bright white and yellow light. Underneath this sky sits a quiet village of houses around a church, whose steeple rises above the undulating blue-black mountains in the background. A tree sits in the foreground of this night scene. Flame-like, it reaches almost to …show more content…
the top edge of the artwork, this creates a visual link between the land and the sky. Considered as a symbol, the tree could be viewed as a bridge between life, which is shown by the earth, and death, which is shown by the sky, which is usually associated with heaven. The trees are Cypresses which were regarded as trees of the graveyard and mourning. “But the sight of the stars always makes me dream,” van Gogh once wrote. “Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France? Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star.” (MoMA Learning) The Starry Night is based on Van Gogh’s observations and his imagination, memories, and emotions.
For example, the church looks like the ones in Holland, where he used to live. The whirling lines in the sky, however, match published astronomical observations of clouds of dust and gas known as nebulae. It is both balanced and expressive, and the composition is structured by his ordered placement of the tree, steeple, and central nebulae, while his many short brush strokes and paint that is thickly applied set causes its surface to create a rolling motion. This combination of visual contrasts was created by an artist who discovered beauty and interest in the night, which, for him, was “much more alive and richly colored than the
day.”
To begin, he uses an array of colors that allows each color in the sky to blend and transition harmoniously. Church also uses primary and secondary colors within the sky that consists of teal-green, reds, and bright yellow next to each other. This creates a contrast between the darker red shades in the cloud and the lighter shades of bright yellow in the sun. Besides the different shades that are being used, Church uses both neutral values and saturation. The neutral scheme can be seen in the black and gray-brown values of the trees and shadows in the bottom part of the painting. This, in comparison to the high saturation levels of the colors in the sky create a contrast. The colors in the sky are in their purest hue which means they are bright, and this being next to the dull and dark colored mountains and trees creates a contrast and more of an emphasis on the brightly colored sky. Those different colors also fall under complementary and analogous colors. The red cloud complement the blue-green colors of the sky they are in. There is also a heavy use of reds, oranges and yellows, all falling next to each other on the color wheel shows Church’s use of analogous
The image is set inside ‘bedroom in Arles’ the room’s walls are stamped in bloody handprints. The centre of attention is a decapitated aboriginal man, with blood shooting from his body merging into Van Gogh’s appropriated painting ‘Starry Night’. The man appears to be posing in a very exhausted way. In front of this aboriginal man are two be-headed heads, these heads seem to resemble a European marble-like statues. The bedroom is an unfinished room layering nicely over Vincent’s ‘Starry Night’.
With its swirling colors and lines, 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. "Waves and swirls" were applied so thickly in this piece that the paint itself cast shadows.
References 2, 7, 8- "Vincent Van Gogh- Portrait of an Artist" Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, pages 7, 85, and 86. Published in 2001.
From the piece of artwork “Rain at the Auvers”. I can see roofs of houses that are tucked into a valley, trees hiding the town, black birds, clouds upon the horizon, hills, vegetation, a dark stormy sky and rain.
Also, the work is so outwardly compelling in its portrayal of a consoling yet euphoric inclination that it need not depend on topic for group of onlooker’s reaction. The Starry Night is the result of a long and escalated perspective, and is a painstakingly built combination of society, religion, science, style, and compositional
Starry Night and View of Toledo are both landscapes featuring a town, a church, and a beautiful night sky. Both artists used the contrast of light and dark to detail their paintings. They both also took liberties in arranging the cities the way they saw fit.
Vincent Van Gogh was one of the most influential contributors to the post-impressionist movement even though his paintings were not respected or accepted in his own time. Post-impressionism refers not to a collective style but to a time period, which falls between 1880 and 1910. Such a term as post-impressionism indicates the increasingly fragmented artistic scene that would come to characterize modern art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Stokstad 1039). During Van Gogh's final years he began to paint in a very expressionistic manner because of his heightened emotional state at the insane asylum. Van Gogh used these feeling to paint in a more emotional style than in a realistic style. This emotional state can explain some of his paintings like "The Starry Night". This painting was created while in the insane asylum and its seems like Van Gogh was already thinking about his death and about moving to a heavenly place above in the stars (www.tqn.com/library/weekly/aa.032798.htm).
Vincent Van Gogh was formed by his social, cultural and historical context. This is expressed clearly in the underlying stories of both paintings, Starry Night, 1889 and Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889. Both of these paintings portray a narrative relating to Van Gogh significantly as he emotionally connects to the subject in each painting. Van Gogh’s aim of these subjective works was to express meaning through colour and express the painting to a more personal emotion for the viewer. Van Gogh belonged to a small style of Post Impressionism which was a reaction against Impressionism and their formality.
“Starry, starry night; Paint your palette blue and gray; Lookout on a summer’s day; With eyes that know the darkness in my soul” This is from a song written by Don Mclean to commemorate Vincent van Gogh. The lyrics accurately portray the short, tortured life of this iconic artist. (Attention Getter).
In this essay will be talking about and comparing between the traditional painting Starry night by Vincent Van Gogh and the digital movie poster for Midnight in Paris designed by the company Cardinal Communications USA. Starry Night is an artwork that was painted in 1889 in an asylum at Saint-Remy-de-Provience, France while the Midnight in Paris poster is digitally made somewhere in the USA by someone in that company sometime in 2010. While both these artworks are very different, they have some similarities.
Vincent van Gogh painted Starry Night while residing in an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence, France. You can still see this painting at the New York Museum of Modern Art.
On the first scan, the bright moon captures the most attention. It is the most vivid object on the painting, where all other objects are illuminated through its brilliance. From above, the moon illuminates what looks like a port, people going about their way on water and land. From afar, objects
A.E Housman, Vincent Van Gogh, and Walt Whitman are all artists who have composed works of stars and the night sky. Their pieces are labeled “Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall”, Starry Night, and “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”. There may be similarities and differences in the pieces, but they all revolve around the same message and theme of stars. The three artists somehow connect through these works but also affect the audience differently.
’’ Starry Night” by Edvard Munch, an expressionist painting that represents a landscape during the night time in a city off Norway where he spent one of his summers. The artist was often inspired by Paul Gaugin style. The painting describes a single moment where everyone can lose