Starry night

 

https://x.com/JamesLucasIT/status/2097263966921605204?s=20

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

Reading the comments on this post told me everything I need to know about art. So many of you wrote to say you felt the exact same thing I did standing in front of the Starry Night. That strange pull, the sense that the painting is somehow alive... It turns out the feeling is completely universal. I am not someone who gets emotional easily. But every so often a piece of art really gets to me. And that is exactly what happened the first time i walked up to Van Gogh's magnum opus. I know how that sounds, it is one of the most famous paintings on earth, almost a cliché to be moved by it. But maybe it is that famous for a reason... It genuinely looks like it is moving while you stand there, shifting in a way I cannot explain and have never seen in any of the thousands of paintings I have looked at in my life. The same day I took the photo below, I also filmed this short video. It still comes nowhere near the real thing, but you can at least catch a little more of it here, the thick ridges of paint, the way the stars and swirls lift right off the canvas. This technique is called "impasto", from the Italian for mixture. It means paint laid on so thickly that every brushstroke and ridge stays visible on the surface. Van Gogh piled it on with a loaded brush, building the stars up thick so they would blaze as bright as possible against the dark. But no video and no explanation of technique can really convey what it feels like to stand in front of it. And the fact that so many of you felt the very same thing says something true about what art is really for. Tolstoy said it best: "The receiver of a true artistic impression is so united to the artist that he feels as if the work were his own and not someone else’s, as if what it expresses were just what he had long been wishing to express. A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist. In this uniting of it with others lies the great attractive force of art."

James Lucas

@JamesLucasIT

I took this photo four years ago, standing right in front of it at the MoMA in New York, and nothing had prepared me for the real thing. Seeing The Starry Night in person is still one of the most magical things art has ever done to me... What a screen can never show you is the paint itself: Van Gogh squeezed it straight from the tube onto the canvas, building the sky in thick, raised ridges you can practically feel, so the stars and swirls stand up off the surface and catch the light as you walk by. It's not just a picture of the night sky, it's a physical storm of paint, and standing before it, everything seems to move. He made it in 1889, from the barred window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, during one of the darkest moments of his life. He wrote to his brother Theo that the night was "more alive and more richly colored than the day," and once you have seen it with your own eyes, you understand exactly what he meant...