Mr. Maust
2 February 2016
Nocturne
An Analysis of
The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh “This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise, with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big,” wrote Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo. Fascinated by oil and water brush style painting, and brooding in a slow gloom of the mind, van Gogh remains the most well known impressionist artist around the world. Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night has risen now to the peak of acclaim; a masterwork, known through the world for its mesmerising twirls upon the whirling sky, as well as the glinting eddies of stars above blue rolling hills, both which bind any eyes who look upon the painting with all its many …show more content…
Common of impressionist artists, an attempt to capture the motion of light was made by van Gogh himself. This can be seen on the starlight-dappled waters of Starry Night over the Rhone, and the glinting stars that twinkle in the deep night of the former Starry Night. Caused by luminance, our brain’s cortex clashes when focused on the twirls and swirls, making the stars appear as though they flicker and radiate a pulsing light. van Gogh painted The Starry Night while in stay at the Saint-Paul de Mausole asylum, following the mutilation of his ear in an episode of depression and agitation; but it seems that paintings from his episodes of agitation behave similarly to the way fluid turbulence is understood. Munich’s The Scream may appear turbulent, but when examined, it is still and unmoving. This is because the bending curves, of blue and yellow upon the eddies, of The Starry Night are eerily similar, in form and in motion, to the fluid structures noted by Kolmogorov’s equation. Vincent van Gogh’s episodes of emotional turbulence allowed him to physically represent the insurmountably hardest concept of physics, that is still obscure to modern physicists