This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Starry Night
In the midst of such accredited artworks at the Museum of Modern Art, I saw a large crowd, gathered around a specific section of a wall. Everyone had their fancy DSLRs and camera phones to get a quick snapshot of the mysterious piece and would immediately leave. Once I made my way to the front of the crowd, there it was. Vincent Van Gogh’s 29 x 36 1/4″ oil painting, The Starry Night hung on the wall in front of me, illuminating in symphonic silence from within the very cypress trees and moonlight sky on the canvas.
Van Gogh had painted The Starry Night in 1889 during his year at the asylum in Saint-Rémy de Provence, the most difficult time of his life. However, through his depression and isolation, this masterpiece swirls into success, a view front out of his window with a lucid dream like quality and comforting application of materials. Each brushstroke on the canvas feels like an intuitive decision that progressed with the painting itself and since it is done in impasto, Van Gogh adds physical movement and body to the piece with his thick application of paint. The yellows shine at the perfect humble volume and the blues and greens danced together across the sky and throughout the village, sweeping our eyes deep into The Starry Night.
