RAGANAS, RICHARD P.

HUMAN 1

BSIT- 3A MIDTERMPROJ1

MY INTERPRETATION OF THE PAINTING OF VINCENT VAN GOGH

My interpretation about the painting of Vincent Van Gogh is called “The Starry Night” is
Starry Night is often considered to be Van Gogh's pinnacle achievement. Unlike most of
his works, Starry Night was painted from memory, and not out in the landscape. The
emphasis on interior, emotional
life is clear in his swirling,
tumultuous depiction of the sky
a radical departure from his
previous, more naturalistic
landscapes. Here, Van Gogh
followed a strict principal of
structure and composition in
which the forms are distributed
across the surface of the canvas
in an exact order to create
balance and tension amidst the
swirling torsion of the cypress
trees and the night sky. The
result is a landscape rendered
through curves and lines, its
seeming chaos subverted by a rigorous formal arrangement. Evocative of the spirituality
Van Gogh found in nature, Starry Night is famous for advancing the act of painting
beyond the representation of the physical world.

There are various interpretations of Starry Night and one is that this canvas depicts
hope. It seems that van Gogh was showing that even with a dark night such as this it is
still possible to see light in the windows of the houses. Furthermore, with shining stars
filling the sky, there is always light to guide you. Van Gogh experienced his second
breakdown in seven months in July 1889. Naifeh and Smith theorize that the seeds of
this breakdown were present when Van Gogh painted The Starry Night, that in giving
himself over to his imagination "his defenses had been breached. On that day in mid-
June, in a "state of heightened reality," with all the other elements of the painting in
place, van Gogh threw himself into the painting of the stars, producing, they write, "a
night sky unlike any other the world had ever seen with ordinary eyes.