The Starry Night - The Beginning....

Wow, Vidya you beat me to it !!! Starry Nights has always been a favorite of mine, I remember very vividly my first encounter with Van Gogh...I was about 8 or 9 years old and my grandfather used to smoke a pipe that he stuffed with tobacco. This tobacco came in a very colorful pouch and it was printed with one of Van Gogh's painting, and although I was too young to know who he was I remember the vivid brush strokes, the rich earthy colour and my mother told me it was Van Gogh...growing up I also loved the song "Vincent" by Don Mclean and the lyrics start with "Starry Starry Nights..." and the whole song was about how he was never understood and how beautiful his paintings were...you can check out the  Lyrics of Vincent here.

So, when I began my love affair with Art History, I loved the Impressionists and Post-Impressionist painters because they struggled to put forth their ideas, break out of the moulds and break the rules that had them all tied up. Vincent was one such painter...although he began drawing when he was a child, he never took up painting till he was in his twenties...and he painted his best masterpieces in the last two years of his life..Vincent was an introverted, silent and brooding type. He was very religious and longed to become a preacher. He suffered rejection and loneliness. His emotions are so prominent in his paintings..After many years of illness and finally institutionalization, he committed suicide at the age of 37 ! 

The Starry Night, June 1889, was his Magnum Opus, he painted it from the window of his Sanitorium in a village in the South of France, Saint Remy. He painted a lot of Cypress trees in many paintings and included one in this painting too. The village scene and church spire is typical of his hometown. There are mountains, olive trees and a beautiful starry night...

My take on Starry Night...Vincent was a deeply spiritual man and he was also very much in love with and comfortable in the presence of nature...He was put off by the hypocrisy of man and more so religious men. In this picture we see both nature and the church that point upward towards heaven...but the tree, or nature, is much taller than the church spire, indicating that nature takes us closer to God than religion..

Maybe he painted it out of his insanity, but it truly is a masterpiece...Goodbye Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you.....