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...
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,…
