As a project, my senior year of high school, we were asked to write a fifteen page report on a historical figure. I choose to write it on Van Gogh, emphasizing on Starry Night. The more I got into Van Gogh's work the more I became fascinated with the man behind the paintings. Van Gogh was a tormented soul and through the years you can see that his paintings project this. When you look at his earlier paintings you see that he used lighter colors such as yellows, whites, and oranges. He also painted from visuals that he projected from real life scenes such as self portraits, landscapes, and still life's. Van Gogh was faced with many challenges in his life from hatred by his own brother, to whom he strongly looked up to, to having to deal with his own sexuality. By my opinion, I felt that he was way beyond his time but during the impressionistic period these mental torments lead to the distinction that Van Gogh was legally insane. He was committed to an insane asylum where he was forced to paint most of his landscapes and stills from memory. You will notice that his paintings went from distinct two- dimensional shapes and lines to almost three-dimensional, abstract swirls. Van Gogh also went from using brighter colors, which I mentioned before, to darker blues, blacks, and grays, which was in part due to the mental anguish that he received while in the asylum. From this came one of his most famous pieces of work that we now know as "Starry Night". .
The reason that I chose this painting was because when I was about 5 years old, my mother hung a painting of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night in my room above my bed. I never really knew why, but I used to sit up at night, for hours, just starring at it and noticing all of the shapes, colors, and depth. Of course, I didn't know all of that at the time because I was only five years old but for some reason I had a feeling that the longer you stared at this painting the swirls and colors seemed to jump out at you.
