Picture Analysis of ‘Starry Night’ by Vincent van Gogh
Starry Night is perhaps Van Gogh’s most popular painting. He completed the painting in June 1889, while undergoing treatment at the St. Remy de Provence mental asylum, a little over a year before his untimely and tragic suicide at the age of 37. Van Gogh had voluntarily committed himself to the institution in a last-ditch effort to save his sanity. It was a vain effort, but the time period was Van Gogh’s most productive; he completed 142 paintings between May 1889 and May 1890.
Starry Night (oil on canvas) first and foremost is a reflection of the turbulent and torturous combination of manic ecstasy and melancholy that battled for control of Van Gogh’s mind. Even the title itself is a bit of an oxymoron, for the astral bodies depicted by Van Gogh are so bright and overstated as to almost bring the feeling of daylight to the painting. Van Gogh had intended this specifically: his aim, among others, was to render the time of day when you see the green beetles and cicadas fly up in the heat, (Van der Wolk, 1990, p. 218), no matter that painting depicted a night view from his asylum window.
Accordingly, the use of greens, and yellow (for the stars and moon), and the striking blue for the night sky, are perfect examples of Van Gogh’s remarkable use of color not only in Starry Night but all his works. The artist himself was cognizant of his vibrant and unusual color technique, freely using it as a tool of self-expression instead of mere reflection: `Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes,’ he wrote, `I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly’. (Pioch, 2002) He had specific thoughts about how to use color to represent the eternal distance of space, of the night sky: I paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive (Van Gogh, 1888).
In Starry Night, the stars and moon themselves seem to leap into the foreground and into the consciousness of the viewer due to the unusual color choices employed to portray them.
Also, the moon and each star in the painting are not only oversized, but each possess exaggerated coronas which appear to almost be whirling, creating a sense of dizzying centrifuge-like momentum in the painting that serves to drawn in and hypnotize the observer.
They appear to possess a clockwise rotational pattern, as do the cloud formations under the stars, which also carry a sense of rightward movement. It is as if the clouds, stars, and moons are mini-hurricanes, each an individual emotional tempest which contributes to the vast sense of urgency which underlies this painting of a tableaux which, had it been captured by photograph, would likely have been a serene and tranquil landscape. The urgency is not random, however; the organization and control behind the direction of movement and momentum suggests instead an organic structure and flow to the universe, which would in turn suggest some sort of implication of divine or higher structure and power that Van Gogh may have been trying to impart into the work.
The sense of movement, whirling, and momentum are enhanced and exaggerated by what at this point in time had become something of a Van Gogh signature characteristic the large, swiped brush strokes. This signature is partially explained by Van Gogh’s participation in the unfolding of the movement of impressionism, in which such broad strokes were a technique used to suggest a somewhat fantastical and exaggerated sense of reality, as opposed to capturing reality itself.
Van Gogh liked to capture the feeling of a moment, not the moment per se, to such an extent that he hated to paint a scene from memory; ironically, Starry Night was in fact a painting from memory, which may account for its heightened fantasy feel. From a more technical perspective, Van Gogh’s brush stroke technique was also a conscious attempt to capture the feeling of the sorts of exaggerated lines and strokes that were found in popular wood cut works of art from earlier in the century.
The other explanation is that the nature of Van Gogh’s brush strokes was a reflection of both the mental and physical aspects of his mental illness. Epilepsy, manic depression, and schizophrenia are among the ailments from which modern physicians have theorized that Van Gogh suffered. Taken alone, Starry Night may not be evidence enough of the progression of Van Gogh’s illness in terms of brush strokes, but subsequent works — as Van Gogh approached the date of his suicide — feature increasingly frenzied and exaggerated — and less self-controlled — brush strokes, such those found in as Wheat Field Under Stormy Sky, Wheat Field with Crows, and the somewhat ghoulish Self-Portrait, the latter of which was completed after the artist had attempted to slice of his own ear.
Van Gogh also made fascinating use of perspective in Starry Night. The celestial elements in the painting the stars, moon, and their manic, swirling coronas, are positioned center stage, not distantly and serenely overseeing the town. The effect is to emphasize the power and awe-inspiring nature of the heavens at the expense of worldly, man-made objects.
Accordingly, the town itself appears to almost be compressed into an artificially and surreally small area of the lower right-hand section of the painting. The only two elements in the painting whose placement and perspective provide them any indication of power are the cypress tree in the foreground, which is artificially huge. (Incidentally, not all critics agree that this large dark object is indeed a cypress tree, but given the compositional similarity of Starry Night with a later Van Gogh work, May 1890’s Road with Cypress and Stars, it is a reasonable conclusion to reach.)
The cypress tree is not a man-made object; it is nature-made, or divinely inspired perhaps, and soars towards the heavenly bodies. (The choice of the cypress tree seems also less of an accident when one considers that the cypress is the traditional tree of cemeteries. Of course, it is also simply possible that there was a cypress tree visible from the Van Gogh’s window in the asylum, though that does not preclude its symbology.) Also notably soaring towards the heavens is the church spire in the town. The majestic spire, like the cypress tree, is exaggerated in relative size, jutting towards the heavens in respect and awe, the only man-made object imbued with power in the painting. Van Gogh’s religious beliefs, however oddly they may have evolved due to experience and mental illness, are clearly on display.
Indeed, while a liberated and worldly thinker who disdained the dogma of earlier Christianity, Van Gogh was also a deeply spiritual man (he was a preacher in his 20s) who layered religious and spiritual imagery and symbology throughout his works. Starry Night is no exception. While there is little corroborating evidence from Van Gogh’s own comments on the matter, the precise number of stars — eleven — in Starry Night seems to be intentional. The Biblical narrative of Joseph, in Genesis 37:9 is telling: ’Look, I have had another dream’ he said, ‘I thought I saw the sun, the moon and eleven stars, bowing to me.’ Also, at the direct center of the painting, the swirling intersection from the cloud formation appears to form a representation of the Yin-Yang symbol found in a number of Eastern religions and philosophies such as Buddhism.
The Yin-Yang is a symbol of oppositional integration, i.e., the interdependency of male and female, light and dark, creation and destruction, good and evil. It is known that at the very least, Van Gogh was deeply impressed by the Japanese works of art he had seen in during a visit to Paris in 1886, so his inclusion of the Yin-Yang symbol may not have been an accident, and even it if were, it may have been a semi-accidental unconscious inclusion. It was not until Carl Jung’s writings on the collective unconscious and the universal symbols in mankind’s creative work that critical thought on unconscious metaphysical symbolism came to the forefront in the art world, but evidence seems to suggest that archetypal symbology is rife within Van Gogh’s work in Starry Night, whether he intended it or not.
Perhaps, ultimately, Van Gogh knew on some level that his death was near, and in painting Starry Night he was trying to provide some measure of comfort to himself and to his loved ones. Before he had even envisioned the painting, he wrote prophetically to his brother Theo: The moon is still shining, and the sun and the evening star, which is a good thing - and they also speak of the love of God, and make one think of the words: “Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”
Tags: artists, God, manic depression, painting, schizophrenia, Starry Night, Van Gogh
