Visual Analysis Of Starry Night

When Vincent Van Gogh created this painting he had to have thought out the design greatly because it is bursting with plenty of elements and principles of design. The design aspects of this painting are great and lead you all over the place to give you a story and understanding of the painting. Starry Night has many design elements and principles. Van Gogh used the primary triad in this painting. Blue is heavily used throughout the whole piece. Yellow is used mostly in the top part of the painting and the accented through the lower part of the image. Red can be found in the cypress tree and along the roof tops of a few houses in the piece. The values range from bright to significantly dark. As you can see on map Value: Dark, the darkest parts …show more content…
There are many varieties of implied line in the stars in the sky, the hills in the lower right side in the background, the bushes on the left and right sides of the tree in the middle ground. There’s a line on the steeple of the church and a line on the houses, see map Implied Line. There are actual lines in the wind depicted in the center of the sky, the rolling hills, the bushes and the tree. All the lines in the hills, the tree and houses all lead to the steeple. The steeple then leads us to the sky. The tree also leads us from the ground up into the sky. Though the Cypress tree is the focal point of the piece it is not the focal area. The focal area is the crescent moon up in the sky, see map Focal Area: moon. The moon is the brightest area is right in an area that is majority blue, which gives contrast and all the stars and the swirling wind bring us right to the …show more content…
The lighter values being in the top half also balance out the darker values on the bottom. You can see the depth of space used in this painting by how the perspective of the tree and the steeple. You can also feel the space with the rolling landscape. The strokes in this image also give a sense of swirling motions giving this piece a dreamy night feeling. The strokes also give plenty of texture to the image making it so much more visually interesting than if it were just painted just naturally straight. His color choices give the main focal point (the tree) and the focal area (moon) lots of emphasis. The moon being the brightest value and the tree being the darkest value and the hills being in the middle of the composition and value spectrum, make a unity for the background, middle ground and foreground. The Moon and stars show the time of the piece being night time. The perspective we are given for this image makes the proportions of this image pretty accurate. If Van Gogh had not used the addition of reds in this image it would be a very muted cool piece and with the use of all the nature it would be unbalanced. The use of color value and scale all are what makes this painting balanced. And brings harmony. The contrast of the light colors on the mid tones bring