Creative Commons Coloring Book - Art

Art: A Starry Night

It often seems to me that the night is much more alive and richly coloured than the day.
-- Vincent van Gogh[*]Letter from Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, September 8, 1888 https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let676/letter.html

Vincent van Gogh painted A Starry Night in 1889 while staying at a mental health asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. This swirling night sky, with its glowing stars and peaceful village below, wasn’t just a picture - it was van Gogh's way of blending reality with his imagination.

Van Gogh saw life as a profound, often spiritual struggle, believing deeply in the interconnectedness of nature, humanity, and emotion. He valued sincerity and simplicity, and felt art should reflect more than beauty, but raw human experience and emotion.

Skeptical of academic traditions, he favored instinct and observation of nature over rigid rules. In A Starry Night, van Gogh used expressive brushwork and swirling blues, yellows, and greens to express the vibrant energy he felt in the night sky, treating color as a language to convey emotion. Coloring books provide an opportunity to explore the impact of color - especially by coloring the same picture in different ways.

Van Gogh faced mental health challenges and poverty through much of his life, yet thorugh it all, he created over 2,000 artworks in just a decade. Sadly, he never knew how famous his work would become.

For myself, I declare I don’t know anything about it [whether artists live on only through their work, or if there is something more]. But the sight of the stars always makes me dream in as simple a way as the black spots on the map, representing towns and villages, make me dream.
     Why, I say to myself, should the spots of light in the firmament be less accessible to us than the black spots on the map of France?
     Just as we take the train to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to go to a star. What’s certainly true in this argument is that while alive, we cannot go to a star, any more than once dead we’d be able to take the train. So it seems to me not impossible that cholera, the stone, consumption, cancer are celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, omnibuses and the railway are terrestrial ones.
     To die peacefully of old age would be to go there on foot.
     -- Vincent van Gogh[*]Letter from Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo, July 10, 1888 https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let638/letter.html

Original Image: Wikimedia Commons This work is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 100 years or fewer.

Edited to be a black and white drawing rather than a color photo.

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