To this day, Vincent Van Gogh is known as one of the world's renown artists; however, he was very mentally unstable. On top of that, he only sold one painting in his life time! To this day, I wonder how his paintings suddenly became so famous...

Though I am pretty familiar with this artist, I learned quite a bit of new and interesting things about him in class. One of them was his complete obsession for Japan. One of his paintings, "Self Portrait as Bonze," he even created himself with Japanese features. Though I saw this painting numerous times in my life, I paid no attention to the fact that he created himself to look oriental. 

Notice that his hair is cut like traditional Japanese Monks; furthermore, he painted himself with oriental shaped eyes. An unusual contrast is formed from the way the eyes are set into his face and bone structure, suggesting that this is not his natural appearance. Oddly enough, this painting was sent as in invitation to Paul Gauguin to come to this avant garde artist event. This would basically be a few days of zen, painting, and good times. Gauguin left because of Van Gogh's eccentric behavior, and Gogh cut of his ear because of this. Think about this for a second...someone would have to be seriously disturbed to pull that off.

The Starry Night (1899) is initially seen as soothing and calm. The town is peaceful but the spire and swirly sky seems to suggest something sinister. Van Gogh checked himself into an asylum and this is what he saw outside of his window. When he couldn’t sleep, he felt that night was a raging typhoon that was ready to swallow him up. 

Unfortunately, Van Gogh's committed suicide, most likely because of his highly unstable health. Though I see his paintings frequently in the every day world, I now have a slightly deeper understanding of some of his paintings.