Vincent Van Gough is one of the most well known artists of all time, and one of his most popular paintings, The Starry Night, is an expression of his mystical vision. Vincent Willem Van Gogh was born in The Netherlands in 1853, he was a mentally plagued man but in his times of clarity produced works of art that to this day continue to astound people (Frank P.375). The Starry Night is oil on canvas landscape painting that Van Gough painted while in a mental Asylum at Saint-Remy in 1889 (Webmuseum). The Starry Night is one of the most recognizable paintings in the world and Van Gough’s techniques used in this work of art have elements and principles of design that made it renowned, famous and still admired and studied to this day.
The Starry Night, Van Gough uses the elements of art to create an inner, subjective expression of his response to nature (MoMA 35). Van Gough uses lines and shape in a soft manner; the lines are thick and curved to make organic, natural shapes that form the night sky. The painting portrays the town as sleepy and quiet under the vast night sky with the cypress tree overtaking the countryside. He used horizontal lines to create depth in the night sky while the vertical lines on the cypress tree draw the viewer to the object as it overtakes the countryside. The contrasting colors between the stars and the sky and the use of color with the bright stars and dark background create the illusion of depth. The cypress tree also is magnificent when compared to the scale of other objects in the painting. The curving lines of the cypress tree mirror the sky and create depth in the painting. He uses color in an expressive manner to create a dark night with glowing orbs that light the sky over the town. He starts with yellow and orange circles to depict the stars with a high intensity of color and then circles out with greenish yellow and white to contrast the low intensity colors of blue and