Pick and art work that is influenced by astronomy Essay

Pick and art work that is influenced by astronomy - Essay Example He was a Post-Impressionist artist, and like the Impressionists he could make use of the newly available ready prepared paints in tubes which made it much easier to paint outdoors, perhaps painting in the grounds of the asylum, but in this case he is looking east through an open window. In April 1888 Van Gogh wrote: - Although the image of the sky is exaggerated and unrealistic, yet it remains one everybody can relate to, as we have all been outdoors at night at some point in our lives, and gazed up a the wonders of the heavens, swirls of clouds, stars pricking the darkness, and the beautiful moon in all its stages. We were not however experiencing Van Gogh’s particular state of mental illness, in which realities were so exaggerated that it caused him to paint the stars so large and producing what Naifah and Smith ( page 762) refer to as :- This was painted of course long before space exploration or modern telescopes. Van Gogh did not know that the moon is just a lump of dusty rock. He may not have known that the light we see from the stars is historical, in that it has taken considerable time to reach Earth because of the immense distances involved. In this case each star is surrounded by a lesser light, a halo. This may perhaps indicate a very cold night, or it could have some significance to Van Gogh. The many swirls and curves are part of the attraction of this work. They carry the viewer’s eyes around the painting from one point to the next and round again. It is a painting of the imagination. Even the village of St Remy doesn’t look exactly as it really was, perhaps because it is not visible from the asylum windows, but some things are factual, in this case the very bright star depicted immediately right of the cypresses is actually the planet Venus, the rising morning star ( Whitney, page 356, 1966). Soth ( page 305,1996) states that Van Gogh wrote to