Anon-Artist and Vincent van Gogh

Below we see Vincent van Gogh “The starry night” oil-on-canvas the painting is dominated by a moon- and star-filled night sky. It takes up three-quarters of the picture plane and appears turbulent, even agitated, with intensely swirling patterns that seem to roll across its surface like waves. It is pocked with bright orbs—including the crescent moon to the far right, and Venus, the morning star, to the left of centre—surrounded by concentric circles of radiant white and yellow light.

Beneath this expressive sky sits a hushed village of humble houses surrounding a church, whose steeple rises sharply above the undulating blue-black mountains in the background. A cypress tree sits at the foreground of this night scene. Flame-like, it reaches almost to the top edge of the canvas, serving as a visual link between land and sky. Considered symbolically, the cypress could be seen as a bridge between life, as represented by the earth, and death, as represented by the sky, commonly associated with heaven. Cypresses were also regarded as trees of the graveyard and mourning. This idea of using a flora or fauna to represent mourning and loss in apparent in both our exploration of loss, Van Gogh referring to a physical loss of a person whereas mine is the loss that is to come from pesticide abuse.

Once again this unknown artist has taken the unique brush strokes of an artist and used this to create a piece of art that is so similar yet so far removed from the original. The image by Van Gogh is about a dream like state of beauty and remembrance, even the town in the image has very little effect on the environment around it seemingly merging with with colours and form or the natural habitat around it, but in the re imagined version we see the Cyprus tree ( associated with death) replaced by a factory pumping smoke into the image. This is a clever way to maintain the original association with death but rather a bridge between two words he has created a bridge dividing two worlds. The beautiful and peaceful environment and the hard and cold factory that is dominating the image. Also take note of how the church has become much larger and overpowering in the image, could this be a statement on how religion is having just as much as a detrimental effect on out planet as the more physical smoke is having in the image?