Analysis of Van Gogh's Starry Night

Starry Night

Van Gogh's Starry Night is an impossibly vivid painting of a night sky. The artist renders the glowing moon and shimmering stars with as much depth and intensity as a daytime scene. Van Gogh's brush strokes and vivid color palette are characteristic of the Dutch artist's style. Rich royal blues consume the bulk of the canvas, allowing to crescent moon rendered in yellow to pop and glow.

The foreground bears a cluster of cypress trees, rendered in the shade and shadows. The viewer stands immediately behind the cypress trees, on a hill perched over the small European townscape. In the distance are rolling hills that merge and blend into the encroaching clouds. A church steeple and the cypress tree are the only two elements of the Van Gogh composition with vertical, upward momentum. The eye is drawn towards the heavens, and the mind makes the connection between nature's steeple, the tree, and the man-made steeple that defines the church building. Both reach toward the skies in their own ways, one because it was born to do so and the other because human hands rendered it so. Reaching upward imparts a sense of hope. Motion is the key element and defining feature of Starry Night, which brings to life an otherwise still evening.

Most of the motion in Starry Night is cyclical and swirling. The central features on the canvas are the light blue swathes of Milky Way or more immediate clouds that undulate in the sky. The steeple of the church points directly at those cloudy swirls. Their circular, spiraling shapes correspond well with the halo-endowed moon and stars, the sensuous rolling hills, and the curvilinear cypress tree in the foreground. Moreover, the swirls impart movement that encourages the viewer's eye to wander freely and joyfully around the canvas. There is also a sense of continuity between the whirlpools of the swirls, the undulating branches of the cypress tree, and the halos of the moon and stars. Van Gogh offers intriguing contrast between the curvilinear elements of Starry Night and the more rigid forms of the buildings that comprise the small town. The artist suggests, intentionally or not, that nature has no straight lines, whereas human beings try incessantly to box in things, ideas, and people.

Intense swirls of light and form impart the sense of drunkenness or even hallucination. A possible capture of the artist's state of mind, the hallucinatory effect is one of the reasons Starry Night is such a compelling composition. Not only is drunkenness or hallucination suggested, but also a powerful sense of loneliness. The viewer can see the lights on inside the many homes in the village: and can almost imagine the warmth and friendship that lies within them. By contrast, the viewer stands alone above a certainly romantic scene. The swirling stars come alive to compensate for the lack of human contact. Moreover, the stars are surrounded by large halos making their center point appear like pupils of an eye. Self-consciousness and self-reflection, perhaps morbid self-reflection, are implied. Yet the halos around the stars also make them appear much larger than they would to the naked eye. By exaggerating their size and their impact on the canvas, Van Gogh draws the viewer's attention to rest firmly on the firmament rather than on the townscape below.