By John Chmaj
Holistic:
A world that is ALIVE! The sky swirls, the moon throbs, even the trees shimmer in a Cosmic Dance below a sleeping town.
Blues within blues, sweeps of energy and flow amongst the stars.
A Cosmic Concert – the sky puts on a show for the earth
The brushstrokes march across the canvas – they create a regular rhythm, a cadence of motion.
There is movement from the top left to right with the big sky swirl, and from mid-right to left with the reflective flow downhill that is like a river of light, reflecting the moon’s luminescence
The sky is busy, complex, alive, in contrast the town is orderly, static and sedate. Like a cosmic show being put on for the world.
The stars emit their own rhythm as well, anchored by the moon and large white star. From a musical standpoint there are swirls in the sky and whirlpools around each star.
The dark cypress serves to anchor the horizontal energy with a strong vertical thrust. It also draws the eye upwards, back up into the sky, whenever it settles down into the village. The spire of the church also connects the village and ground to the sky.
There is a ‘liquidity’ to the whole sky scene. The ripples and flows are very evocative of the way waves move in water.
The color palette is balanced and unified/harmonious. The greens, blues are integrated across the entire canvas. Even the cypress respects the palette.
The white and yellows of the stars are localized – the ‘river of yellow’ across the lower center is a key pallet unifying element, as it echoes and reinforces the yellows of the stars.
The stars themselves are more complex color-wise upon closer examination. They are a mix of yellows, blues, whites, greens – just like stars that flicker in the night, they emit various “tones”. This approach captures and suggests the motion one sees in the stars.
The eye sees a lot of this motion at once –
- the swirls
- the stars
- the yellow river of light
- the moon and cypress forming a light/dark counterpoint
- the flow down the hills to the village
- the brush strokes throughout forming a rhythmic texture throughout
And yet there is a stability to this overall design. It has a classical balance of energies and objects. A solid structure like a good song. It holds its energy elegantly, and has its say.
As controversial as Van Gogh’s work (and life) were at this time, looking forward through all the phases of expressionism and abstraction this painting looks absolutely classical and self-controlled in contrast to the gushing, often explicitly messy and amped-up moanings of so many modern artists of the 20th century. If only someone had been around to encourage Vincent in the simplest of ways: to let him know that his soul had nobility and beauty, and he did not need to sacrifice it for any reason. But I hedge into Don MacLean territory – “the world was never meant for one as beautiful as you…”
What would a “chart” for blowing on this look like?
Treatment: “Stella by Starlight” – not only an apt pun on the painting but itself a swirling set of repeated, somewhat mysterious chord progressions, that settles, like the eye, on a stable center (C minor), only to work back up the cypress tree to cycle through the sky once again. The effect is circular: start at the brightest, largest object (the moon), flow down the yellow/blue ridge (no accident Van Gogh shades the ridge with yellow as an inviting transition for the eye down to the lower sections), across the village and back up again to the swirling sky.
Melodic improvisational approach: Progressive layered strokes/licks that generate a sequence of melodies from linked similar fragments
- The stars are self-contained melodic swirls
- The swirls have the most active set of these, in blue waves
- The village is more tightly grouped and contained
- The tree is a continuous, darkly mysterious upwards flow
The multimedia treatment aims to highlight these various components in roughly this order. Note how much the eye yearns for the stars at the end, when they are removed, and the inward sigh as they reappear reassuringly. What would the night be without the stars?