What's so good about Van Gogh's Starry Moon Night?

Van Gogh was not the first person in human history to look up at the starry sky.

In modern cities, street lights are bright, and there are shining signs on high buildings ............................................................................................................................................................

But in Van Gogh's time, although Edison invented the electric light ten years ago, at this moment, the electric light has not spread to the French countryside, so you can still see bright stars when you look up at the sky at night. And if your eyesight is not very good, you will also see a set of apertures around the stars.

Before Van Gogh, few painters painted the starry sky. The most famous oil painting about stars is probably like this:

Tintoretto's The Birth of the Galaxy

In this oil painting depicting the childhood stories of Zeus, Hera and Hercules, the painter shows the origin of milk duct. The milky way was transformed by the milk of Hera, the queen of heaven, splashing all over the sky and turning into stars. The sky is blue and the stars are golden, but you can't tell whether it is day or night.

For oil painters, especially realistic oil painters, painting stars is a very, very risky attempt. Not only the stars, but also the night is a very risky attempt. For impressionist painters, this is even more a problem.

What color is the sky at night?

Black?

If you really paint it black, you will find your mistake. Night is not black, it has a color tendency. Although the colors of all objects at night are different from those during the day, there are also color tendencies and color changes. If you have a pair of well-trained sensitive eyes, you will find rich and delicate colors at night.

So what color is the sky?

Blue?

No, the night sky is not blue either.

As a painter who takes sketch as the main research method, it is very, very difficult to accurately represent the color of the night. Especially for an impressionist painter. For impressionist painters, it is not necessary to be precise in form and delicate in texture, but accurate and vivid colors are indeed necessary. Of course, Van Gogh is the so-called post-impressionism, or post-impressionism. He has his own pursuits, but in essence his main pursuits are related to color, realism and subjective emotional expression. Van Gogh's paintings are not divorced from the real world.

So what color is the night? This is a difficult question for painters of Van Gogh's time to answer.

Another difficulty is that for an oil painter, you can only draw what you see, and your expressiveness is limited. The limitations of pigments or media themselves limit your expressive means and expressive ability. A kind of black like night? You don't even have that paint.

Van Gogh's palette can infer Van Gogh's painting methods.

So what should the stars in the sky look like in the picture?

When you look up at the starry sky, you will feel that those stars are so bright after a long time. Then you will feel that the sky is not so dark, as if there is a sense of transparency.

In fact, just because your eyes adapt to the darkness, your pupils will expand in the darkness, more light will be put in, and then you will see objects and light in a very dark place.

When the light is strong, your pupil will shrink, and when the light is weak, your pupil will enlarge.

But in fact, not all the stars in the sky are as bright as the candles in front of you.

Therefore, in an oil painting that shows the true relationship between light and shade, the stars are just black spots hidden in the dark. Against the black background, there will be some light, but it may not be as bright as the moonlight reflected by the leaves in front of you.

And if you paint the starlight very bright, they will jump out of the picture, get rid of the spatial relationship and become weird.

In this painting, Van Gogh wants to show the night in a small mountain village. The picture should include the sky, distant mountains, farmland, cottages and trees.

That tree is the key to composition.

The distant mountains and nearby cypress trees form an inclined cross, which divides the picture.

This segmentation solves the problems of visual balance and composition of the picture.

In space, the sky and stars are behind, mountains are in front, trees and churches are in front, and trees and the most promising hut are in front. What about these layers of colors?

Van Gogh's method is to use lines and colors to adjust the hierarchical relationship and imply distance.

In the partial screenshot of the middle part on the right above, you can see the relationship between the sky, the distant mountain and the near mountain, and give you a hint of the spatial level through the color difference of these three layers.

And the nearby tree makes you feel closer because of its bright background, which brings the close sense of this backlit object:

Of course, Van Gogh not only relies on light and color to solve the relationship between spatial levels, but also lines are very important means. In the spatial relationship of lines, the front line can always block the back line, and the back line can not be separated from the front object. In this painting, Van Gogh used a lot of lines to force you to give spatial hints, so that he showed very bright stars and the moon, but it didn't make you feel that things in the background were ahead, and lines played an important role:

So the trees in front of the mountain, the chapel and the houses nearby are not dispensable things. These lines depict space layer by layer.

So a mountain village at night, with bright stars, dense cypress trees and vast space, is displayed in front of you.

Van Gogh used blue to represent night.

Blue is the right choice. Blue is a cool color and has the effect of depicting the space itself. Even in the daytime, when you look into the distance, you will only see that the farthest mountain is a hazy blue. Use blue to represent the night, and the night will appear empty and far away. In fact, the more correct method is this:

Kaii Higashiyama's works

Blue, bright blue or deep blue can make the night layered.

However, Van Gogh's handling of these things was not so cautious and conservative. Instead, ultramarine, indigo and purple are used to express the spatial relationship with their own lines and short strokes. Roughly lay out the sky, mountains and ground, and then start to render the bright moon and starlight. ...

Van Gogh's Starry Night is subjective.

Color and light are not only the natural relationship between color and light, but also a brilliant and moving atmosphere.

Around the moon, it will shine round and round, layer by layer.

Around the stars, you have to turn round and round, layer by layer.

It's not enough, it's not wonderful enough. ...

In the mountains and the sword in the sky, there should be layers of hazy rising light. ...

It's not enough, it's not wonderful enough. ...

therefore ...

Let the light in the sky distort! Curling in circles!

So there was the most beautiful and bizarre performance in the whole art history.

All this light looks so real and so strange. ...

In the field of art, innovation is a particularly important thing.

I've never painted before. It's not easy. When you have seen all the art history and museums and been educated in the studio year after year, what would you do if you were asked to draw a starry sky at night? More is not innovation, but following the methods of one predecessor after another to draw familiar works. If you really want to draw something different, you will be under great pressure.

When Van Gogh began to create this painting, what he really showed was not imagination, but courage.

I saw the starry sky at night, so I drew it down, to keep this moment and tell you how brilliant the starlight is in my eyes!

Let's forget the analysis, go back to the beginning, look at this painting quietly, and worship this great painter in an era without electric lights and time-lapse photography. ...

Van Gogh's starry night is in the American Museum of Modern Art. When you go there, please be sure to have a look at the original.