Starry Night San Francisco Painting

This painting is inspired by Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh's 1889 painting: The Starry Night. Van Gogh is a painter that focused on post-impressionism, which used bright colors, exaggerations (shape, form, color), distortions, free/outlandish brush strokes -- as opposed to impressionism's quaint and soft brush strokes, and a focus on natural light/movement/time.

Reading about Van Gogh's biography is really interesting. He began drawing when he was young, but did not begin to paint until his late 20s. In his lifetime, he has produced over 2100 artworks, which includes many oil and watercolor paintings. Impressive.

The Starry Night is an oil on canvas painting and one of his more well-known artworks. It shows the view from his room when he stayed at the asylum, Saint-Remy-de-Provence, in France. In this painting pictured above, you can see some similarities: the notable swirls in the sky and the dark buildings. However, Van Gogh created his swirls with lines while I used shorter strokes. One theory of the Starry Night is that the swirls are actually a part of his hallucinations!

Anyway, the only two important building structures in my painting that "reflects" San Francisco is the coit tower and the transamerica pyramid. The other buildings are vague no-name structures. The funnest part of painting this was definitely the swirls! I used yellow, white, light green, blue, and orange. The light shadows on the buildings was also fun because of the quick stippling brush strokes -- it's refreshing to use new techniques.

I visited the Van Gogh Museum in the Netherlands before, but unfortunately The Starry Night is located in NYC's Museum of Modern Art. Definitely want to go visit it one day!