When people mention ‘Vincent Van Gogh’, we always think that he is a great artist. Nowadays, his artworks are displayed in many museums and appreciated by people in all over the world. Through the raise of his reputation after his death, his story and life are discovered and shared, which let people give him a new name, “mad genius”. Vincent’s life was not easy. Since he failed his careers as an art dealer, a preacher, and an evangelist, he decided to become an artist. During his artist career, he suffered the ups and downs of life with several mental illnesses. Because his mental illnesses, many artistic critics and experts of mental illness think that the spiral and swirling …show more content…
Besides, this mysterious feeling also causes the association with mental illnesses. In Blumer’s article, he mentions a comment on Starry Night from Tralbaut: “The fire that smoldered within him and broke out in hallucinations of the senses has here been set down on canvas in a most striking fashion.” However, if replacing the word ‘hallucinations’ into ‘Imagination’, it will make more sense. Vincent had admitted that he would never use memory, which also means imagination, to paint. However, Vincent was influenced by Gauguin; he began to use his imagination and enjoy this process of using imagination . The author Whitney also gives two paragraphs from Vincent’s letter to illustrate how Vincent changed his mind: “Now I work from memory. Gauguin gives me courage to use my imagination, and it 's true enough that paintings of this kind have something mysterious about them.” and “I should be desperate if my figures were correct. . . my great longing is to make these incorrectness, these deviations, remodellings, changes of reality that they may become, yes, untruth if you like - but more true than the literal truth.” Therefore, since Vincent admitted that he used the memory to paint, we may understand what the spiral patterns in the center of the painting are. According to Whitney, Vincent had the memory of Milky Way and mentioned the blue Milky Way in his letter. Therefore, Whitney declares that although Vincent might didn’t see it because Milky Way wouldn’t appear just before the dawn, but he just painted the Milky Way to achieve his incredible and unreal