Van Gogh's Starry Night

The image I analyzed was one of Van Gogh’s most famous, “Starry Night” This painting was created in 1889. The image itself is an oil painting, and is currently located at the Museum of Modern art in New York City. This is image is the view from Van Gogh’s room at an asylum he put himself into and was painted from memory afterwards. At first glance this image automatically creates a sense of calmness. With its dark warm colors and the seemingly flowing lines that create the image itself. This sense of flowing and calmness make for a very welcoming picture. Van Gogh, in my opinion, is really good at portraying these feelings of calmness. In some of his other paintings about nature, he really captures the serenity of it all. For a very depressed …show more content…
The picture mostly contains dark shades of blue and some black. The color blue is mostly associated with the feeling of calmness; calmness of the mind and body. The sky and the mountains are all different shades of blue, you can really feel the peacefulness of the night depicted. The color yellow and gold also plays a significant role in this picture. It emphasizes the moon and the stars and makes them the first thing your eyes go to. It makes them pop out at you, but not so much so as where you are distracted from the rest of the image. The balance of blue and yellow really help complement each other when it comes to viewing the image. Finally a very dark green, almost black, color is used for the tree that fills up most of the image. The use of this dark shade really helps set up a very big eerie figure that looks as if though its towering over the small …show more content…
In dreams nothing is ever visually clear. Everything is either distorted or doesn’t have a definable shape at all. In this image everything is distorted with the use of wavy lines. Also depending on the dream itself, it can be a very peaceful time. I personally like to think of this image as a dark calm dream you would have. Not a nightmare, but a dream in which you are just an observer gently floating around in the dream world. But there is another dark tone this image has. With the presence of the dark image to the left, it definitely feels like this image is representing a nightmare like state. This is a very powerful image in my opinion. Van Gogh painted this in an asylum, he was disconnected from the outside world while he recovered. In this image you can sense his loneliness and seclusion that he felt in those times. It shows a distant town with giant mountains in the background. It almost seems like its an observer looking out onto civilization alone in the night. Van Gogh was very depressed at the time of this painting, you can feel this within the dark tone the image gives off. The sky also takes up most of the image, as if he was looking to the stars for something. Maybe the depiction of the sky emphasizes his loneliness. The universe is a massive endless place, and we sit alone on our little rock with no idea if we