Vincent Van Gogh; life and his work

Starry Night: The Style of Vision of Vincent Van Gogh

Largely self-taught, van Gogh started his career copying prints and reading nineteenth-century drawing manuals and books. His technique grew out of the idea that to be a great painter you had to master drawing first. Van Gogh felt it was necessary to master black and white before working with color, and so he focused on learning the essentials of figure drawing and depicting landscapes in correct perspective. It was only when he was satisfied with his drawing technique that he began adding in colors and his bold palette became one of the most recognizable features of his later work. Many people consider Van Gogh's letters to be another form of artwork because they include sketches of works that he was focusing on at that time or had just finished. These sketches are proof of van Gogh's growth and they show the progression of his masterpieces. Vincent van Gogh painted over 30 self-portraits between the years 1886 and 1889, reflecting his ongoing pursuit of complementary color contrasts and a bolder composition. His collection of self-portraits places him among the most productive self-portraitists of all time. Van Gogh used portrait painting as a method of introspection, a method to make money and a method of developing his artistic skills. According to the Van Gogh Gallery, his early paintings were dark and traditional in comparison to the works he completed later in life.

            Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh has risen to the peak of artistic achievements. Although Van Gogh sold only one painting in his life, the aftermath of his work is enormous. Starry Night is one of the most well known images in modern culture as well as being one of the most replicated and sought after prints. From Don McLean's song 'Vincent' (Starry, Starry Night) (Based on the Painting), to the endless number of merchandise products sporting this image, it is nearly impossible to shy away from this amazing painting. Although known for his colorful paintings of cypresses and sunflowers, Vincent van Gogh art encapsulated a range of styles. Whether or not this religious inspiration is true, it is known that the piece is not the only Starry Night painting that Van Gogh ever created. Gogh was quite proud of a piece he had painted earlier in Arles in 1888 that depicted stars reflecting in the Rhone River. Like Starry Night this previous piece shares many of the qualities that have made Starry Night such a popular painting. His insistence that the canvases were not a return 'to romanticism or to religious ideas', though somewhat puzzling at first, was intended only to show that the works had nothing in common with earlier mystic paintings. He had once admired religious subjects from ancient art, but he now considered that the feeling of solace should primarily be evoked by the colour and design of representations of nature.

           

            Van Gogh depicted the view at different times of day and under various weather conditions, including sunrise, moonrise, sunshine-filled days, overcast days, windy days, and one day with rain. The hospital staff did not allow Van Gogh to paint in his bedroom, but he was able to make sketches in ink or charcoal on paper, and eventually he would base newer variations on previous versions. The pictorial element uniting all of these paintings is the diagonal line coming in from the right depicting the low rolling hills of the Apelles Mountains. In fifteen of the twenty-one versions, cypress trees are visible beyond the far wall enclosing the wheat field. Van Gogh telescoped the view in six of these paintings, most notably in Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night, bringing the trees closer to the picture plane. Gogh's discipline was as firm as his genius was unruly, and he taught himself all the elements of classical technique with pains­taking thoroughness. He copied and recopied lessons from a standard academic treatise on drawing until he could draw like the old masters, before letting his own vision loose in paint. Although he knew he needed the utmost technical skill, he confessed to an artist friend that he aimed to paint with such "expressive force" that people would say, "I have no technique."While stopping short of calling the painting a hallucinatory vision, Naifeh and Smith discuss The Starry Night in the context of Van Gogh's mental illness, which they identify as temporal lobe epilepsy, or latent epilepsy. Although The Starry Night was painted during the day in Van Gogh's ground-floor studio, it would be inaccurate to state that the picture was painted from memory.