HUMN 303 Week 2 Essay – Painting Analysis & Reflection

Sample Answer

Analysis of Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh

Arguably one of the most recognized paintings in Western art, the Starry Night was painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1889. This outstanding work created during Van Gogh’s stay at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole mental hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, is sometimes associated with the Post-Impressionists’ creative movement. Starry Night is a visually bright painting of a classic work that shows Van Gogh’s internal struggles while adopting the artist’s free thinking through the flexibility of an aerial perspective (Petersen, 2022). Analyzing the historical and artistic elements that shaped the creativity of the image also enables one to appreciate the image and its significance better.

Figure 1 Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh

Post-impressionism Movement

Post-impressionism, the style that developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century in response to Impressionism, is the art movement most characteristically represented in the painting Starry Night. Atkinson (2020) notes that post-impressionists like Vincent Van Gogh wanted to evoke feelings or symbolism through their creations, whereas the Impressionist painters focused on capturing light and mood. Among the most recognized features of the style are the brilliant colors, strong paint application, and the focus on individual emotions rather than on the objectivity of the works. For this reason, Starry Night by Van Gogh, which represents an enlarged sky and the possibility of an amazing and provocative emotional experience, perfectly reflects such moments.

Vincent van Gogh’s Unique Style

From this work, one can identify Van Gogh’s style of painting as unique, especially in how he managed to give the painting a feeling of sternness and texture by using heavy and hairy brushstrokes. Unlike his peers, Van Gogh emphasized establishing an effective channel of strong emotions in artifacts (Jain et al., 2022). Similar to the artists’ mental health disorder, the patterns of the night sky in Starry Night seem to be very active and almost somewhat disorderly. Lin (2019) hints that the artist meticulously balanced symmetrical colors and bright yellow stars against the background of the deep blue night sky to add to the hue’s deep emotion. As a post-impressionist painter, Van Gogh’s style is expressed and rendered through his mastery of his impairment harmoniously aesthetically.

Influences on Starry Night

Several factors influenced the composition of van Gogh’s painting Starry Night. Researchers explain that Impressionists, especially Claude Monet, played a crucial role in Van Gogh’s work since the French artist prioritized light and color in his paintings (Albright & Huybers, 2023). Also, the idea of the placement of the stars and his point of view in Starry Night can be attributed to the Japanese woodblock prints, which Van Gogh admired for their line forms and areas of flat color.

Psychological Context and Emotional Depth

It is documented that when Vincent Van Gogh painted Starry Night, he was suffering from psychological and emotional stress. He had willingly signed himself up with a facility in which he was fighting his mental disorder. Such background is necessary to grasp the image’s emotional substratum density (Voskuil, 2020). While most paintings are complete fabrications, the viewpoint they were given from Van Gogh’s window at the institution inspires me differently (Atkinson, 2020). Typically, the dynamic whirling sky and awesome contrasts in the given paintings represent the deteriorating mental health of the artist in this period.

Reflection on Learning and Appreciation

Studying Starry Night has been an enriching experience, making me better understand the artwork. Interpreting the artwork is less problematic now as I know Van Gogh’s difficulties and the conditions that shaped his ideas. Before getting the background information about the painter, I was only interested in the nocturnal celestial scene that looked more dynamic. Now, it has become a point of genuine materialization of Vincent van Gogh’s struggle.

References

• Albright, A. L., & Huybers, P. (2023). Paintings by Turner and Monet depict trends in 19th-century air pollution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(6). https //doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2219118120
• Atkinson, W. (2020). The sociogenesis of Vincent van Gogh’s fundamental artistic disposition. Cultural Sociology, 14(2), 123–138. https //doi.org/10.1177/1749975520916643
• Jain, V., Zaydfudim, V., & Podboy, A. (2022). Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Abdomen.” Gastroenterology. https //doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2022.04.053
• Lin, H. (2019). Starry Nights Whitman, Epilepsy, and Van Gogh. Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 36(2/3), 189–201. https //doi.org/10.13008/0737-0679.2322
• Petersen, S. (2022). The night albums Visibility and the ephemeral photograph. Leonardo, 109–111. https //doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02325
• Voskuil, P. (2020). Vincent van Gogh and his illness. A reflection on a posthumous diagnostic exercise. Epilepsy & Behavior, 111, 107258. https //doi.org/10.1016/j.yebeh.2020.107258