From the Museum: the Art of Thinking. Part Six: Perception

Abstract

Starry Night is as famous the world over as its creator was obscure. It is both a mirror of its time and the perpetually troubled soul that created it. The night sky is deconstructed into deepened blues and lightened violets (technical immediacy of Impressionism) and reassimilated into a myriad of energised linear swirls and vibrating pulses of yellow-orange radiating out from variably hot centres as a means of revealing an ecstatic inner vision (expressive power of Post-Impressionism). The emotionally charged night sky is pierced by an upward-reaching, flame-swirling, cypress tree (cemetery association) depicted as a dark green silhouette bordering the shadowy coolness of the sleeping village below. The simplicity and sophistication of this image invites us to reflect deeply on Van Gogh's comment that “…death is the road we take to reach the stars…” expressed with sincere clarity during a moment of visionary enlightenment within a period of asylum darkness. For the Impressionists, optical realism separated visual experience from memory, cultivating an extreme indifference to pictorial content. Sunlight was broken down to its primary colours which were then recombined with short, rapid brush stokes capturing the immediacy of the fleeting moment.