For this assignment, I chose Van Gogh's Starry Night. It is not one of my favorite paintings, but it has always intrigued me somewhat as a very influential piece of art. The thing I notice at first glance is how contradicting it is. The scene is very calm, but the style is very agitated. The short, mashed together lines seem to vibrate with intensity in the wind and the tree, shimmer like ripples in the sky with the stars and the moon, and flow and crash like waves in the hills and small trees near the town. It has a very tumultuous sort of feel, it's very unpredictable and unstable, much like the artist himself. I think this is as much a self-portrait of Van Gogh as his literal self-portraits. He also must have spent a very long time on it. Oil paint takes at least a day to dry, and to get this separated sort of texture would require letting each color dry separately, especially where the colors change drastically.
Starry Night is a departure from the more realistic painting styles before its time. It is still representative, but it is more about the emotion than the appearance. It's highly unlikely that anyone would have commissioned a painting like this at the time, the artist had to have painted it for himself, at least just to get the image out of his head. This seems to be art for the sake of art. Speaking separately from any prior knowledge of Van Gogh, it's not likely that artist had much training. However, he did have a good eye, or at least enough teaching to know good composition. The swirling lines of the wind are offset by the more predictable circles of the stars in the sky, the sudden triangular shape of the tree is balanced by the long, sweeping horizontal lines of the hills. It is a well thought out composition, every part of it is noticeable, nothing is overwhelming or out of place.
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