A Handshake in Thought

There are many ways a piece of artwork may exude its beauty: an inviting stretch of sand glistening with wild colors seen only in dreams, a frozen moment in an ethereal Victorian ballet, a petal so real a child cannot help reaching out her small hand to feel it. There are many ways dramas may hold viewers spellbound: a peck on the lips that makes one want to fall in love all over again, a sweet ballad that chases away the summer heat, a heart-pounding flight over dizzying cliffs, bottomless oceans and into the clouds of possibilities. Yet one of the most beautiful and emotional aspects of the arts is often invisible and soundless in the final products.

Chasing Light

Light plays a heavy role in a preponderance of classical paintings. Renaissance and Baroque artists employed light to create atmosphere and dramatic effects. Realists depicted the interactions between object colors and light from the environment. Impressionists, no less, captured fleeting effects of light on their subject matter. Vincent van Gogh, however, practically worshiped the very sources of light themselves.

His starry night paintings, most famously, were awash with his fervent adoration of the celestial bodies. Starlight spiraled on his canvas next to a brightly blazing moon, their radiance swirled around the wide skies by rolling clouds. Thick dollops of paint piled onto the center of his orbs, while intense brush strokes dabbed feverishly away at their exploding rays. As he remarked in a letter to his sister, he was inspired by free-spirited poet Walt Whitman, who saw “under the great starlit vault of heaven a something which after all one can only call God—and eternity in its place above the world.”

The Starry Night (1889)

Starry Night Over the Rhone (1888)