Van Gogh Vincent Van Gogh's Work Is

Van Gogh Vincent van Gogh's work is nearly always identifiable instantly, due to the artist's characteristic use of vivid color and his intense, long brushstrokes. However, earlier van Gogh paintings are more subdued than his later canon. Paintings like "The Potato Eaters," for example, rely on darker palettes. After his inspiring encounter with Japanese woodblocks, van Gogh started to incorporate a richer color palette and his brushstrokes become lengthened almost like calligraphy strokes.

Another noticeable element in van Gogh paintings after his encounter with Japanese woodblocks is a lack of lighting source. Unlike "The Potato Eaters," which has a definite source of light -- an incandescent bulb-- illuminating the table from above, most of van Gogh's later work has a generally even color value throughout the canvas. Rather than depict light coming from a distinct, singular, naturalistic source, the artist has chosen to disembody the light. Color value is dispersed, providing the entire canvas with equal values of light.

There are few shadows, highlights, and lowlights. For example, in "Bedroom in Arles," the room is unnaturally permeated with equal light in all corners and all spaces. Nothing casts a shadow, and nothing is a source of light for the room. Likewise, van Gogh's series of still life paintings with sunflowers are completely different from traditional still life paintings because of the absence of color valuation. Light and shadow are deliberately removed, and the overall effect is vibrancy and intensity of hue.

"Starry Night" exemplifies Van Gogh's curious sense of light and color value. The moon is a crescent, and yet it is depicted as a glowing orb with its halo. Stars are rendered large and swirling, like a camera opened to its widest aperture, capturing the trails of light. In the foreground is a large pine tree that is rendered darkly, but the viewer can see the entire village in the valley. "Starry Night" has a long field of view and depth of field.

Van Gogh's sense of spatial perspective is evident in "Starry Night" but it is more pronounced in "Bedroom in Arles." In "Bedroom in Arles," the perspective is skewed. The proportions are deliberately rendered incorrectly, just as the color and light values are not natural. The right wall next to the bed caves inward, imparting an oppressive feel. The front board of the bed is disproportionately large compared with the back board.

A same type of playful rendering of perspective is evident in "The Night Cafe," in which a billiard hall is rendered as if through a fisheye lens. Van Gogh has a command of perspective, and the artist plays with perspective to play tricks on the viewer. Perhaps to parallel his mental state, van Gogh presents the world in a skewed and distorted manner.

Both his sense of perspective and his color palette, with its strange and unnatural values, give a sense that the viewer is half in the world, and half outside of it. Van Gogh's paintings are representational, and yet they are approaching abstraction given the detachment from reality. Evidence that van Gogh is deliberately playing with perspective is in the way that the artist does occasionally render scenes with more realistic.