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Let us examine/interpret/describe the meaning behind the painting. Write your
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This blog will evaluate the different interpretations of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night, including some of the history of the dutch post-impressionist painter who has become one of the most influential figures in western history and is perhaps most famous for his Starry Night. Which was painted a year before Van Gogh died in 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, France. Van Gogh mainly painted locations with personal meaning and were familiar to him.
In 1888, a year before Starry Night was painted, Van Gogh had an argument with a friend and French artist, Paul Gauguin. The dutch painter had suffered from mental illness throughout his life and was admitted to Arles mental asylum soon after the argument as he cut off his ear. Many believe Starry Night was painted from the view Gogh had from his window in Arles asylum.
Unlike many other artists who painted realistic landscapes and portraits, Van Gogh used exaggerated and expressive brushstrokes to visualize his emotions and reveal personal impressions of the subject being painted. In Starry Night, the emotions of isolation and insanity underlie which relates to how he was a struggling artist with unappreciated artwork. The night sky of Starry Night is brimming with whirling clouds, shining stars and a bright moon. The swirling brushstrokes guide the viewer’s eye around the painting with spacing between the stars creating a dot-to-dot effect. The village is peaceful in comparison to the dramatic night sky. The church steeple dominates the village and symbolizes unity in the town and gives and impression of isolation.
The first interpretation creates a religious presence to the painting. Van Gogh was religious with a religious uncle who was a theologian. Starry night conveys strong feelings of hope through the bright lights of the stars shining down over the dark landscape and night. In 1888, Van Gogh wrote a personal letter which described; “a great starlit vault of heaven… one can only call God”. Starry night depicts moon, stars and a sky surrounded by large halos of light with a church steeple standing out above a smaller, less detailed buildings in the town below. This has been related to Genesis 37:9; “Then he dreamed still another dream and told it to his brothers, saying, “Look, I have dreamed another dream. And this time, the sun, the moon and the eleven stars bowed down to me”. Gogh painted exactly eleven stars in Starry Night, perhaps directly referencing the biblical verse accounting Joseph, a ‘dreamer’ and an outcast in the company of his eleven older brothers. Van Gogh may have related to Joseph as he was an outcast in the art world at the time. In the bible, Joseph was thrown into a pit, sold into slavery and suffered many years of imprisonment, like Gogh did in the last years of his life in the Arles Asylum. Also, no matter what Joseph never received acceptance or respect from his brothers, like how the world-renowned artist never got recognition from art critics of his day.