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Mental Illness In Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night

944 Words4 Pages

Depression. An endless struggle towards the surface of an ocean of self-doubt and worries. Mental illness is not always clear to see and can be expressed in many different ways. Vincent Van Gogh expressed this through his many paintings. It may not be apparent when first looking at Van Gogh’s paintings, but after a while, a pattern can be seen or inferred. It is widely known that Van Gogh was not the most stable person mentally, and many thought that it was depicted in his many paintings. Vincent Van Gogh through his painting The Starry Night has used color, layout, and symbolism to convey his mental illness.
Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night is without a doubt an expressive and captivating artwork. The painting depicts a compact village that is completely illuminated, save for the prominent church in the middle of the town. Pale greens and a smattering of light blue half circles encase the village in a calm forest of sorts until they run into the thin and …show more content…

As time moved closer to Van Gogh’s eventual suicide, cooler colors were used instead of the bright yellows he had used previously. The Starry Night being painted only a year before Van Gogh’s death, mostly contains dark, cool colors, such as blue and black, and very little bright and hopeful colors such as yellow. The article, Vincent Van Gogh: Starry Night (2015) at one point states “it is possible to draw a parallel between the artist’s emotional state and a delicate egg: he is being poked and menaced by the cypress — dark, enclosing force representing a threat (or several threats)” (para. 3). Van Gogh chooses to use black to depict the jagged cypress tree that it seemingly stabbing at the sky. Along the line of the aforementioned article, the chosen blues and white of the night sky represent the vulnerability of Van Gogh’s feelings and mental state depicting the almost constant depression that plagued

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