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Van Gogh... the Astronomer
chrissam writes "The Boston Globe is running a cool article about Vincent Van Gogh and the incredible astronomical accuracy in his depictions of heavenly objects in the night sky. An astronomy class from Southwest Texas State University have been able to pinpoint the exact date and time a recently discovered Van Gogh painting was done - 7pm, June 16, 1890 - based on the location of the painting's subject and the position of Venus in the night sky." The result is perhaps mundane - when a painting was painted is not earth-shattering news. But the process involved is fascinating.
I really do like most of his paintings, but do we really want to delve too deeply into the mind of a man that cut off his own ear? :)
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
It's a novel by the Astronomer 'Bill Napier' (don't confuse it with the Asimov book of the same title). While it's already about Killer asteroids - a slashdot readers favourite topic - it also has a load of nice moments where people use historical documents for astronomy...
Hell it's just a great read
Since there is no reference to the actual painting in the article, an image can be found here at vangoghgallery.com.
http://www.vangoghgallery.com/painting/p_0766.htm
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Considering the name of the class was Astronomy in Art, History, and Literature, I think it was very appropriate.
i'm probably popping into this discussion too late to get noticed, but here's something close to what you want:
starry night painting generator
although not exactly what you're after, it is stunningly beautiful, and most fun to play with.
matt
Painters routinely do this, relocating a tree or a building for better effect.
Perhaps Van Gogh may have been a great photographer had he been born in a later generation. Photographers have to find their compositions.
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It sounds like either Van Gogh painted some unusually detailed and accurate paintings, or people are just reading too much into what are effectively works of fiction. Well, the house with the filled-in window was pretty impressive evidence of the former, so perhaps Van Gogh was more of a photographer than an artist.
:-)
(Let the flames begin...
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
> That whole canvas in an hour.
Um, no How about: Make a sketch of the outlines & positions of the objects in the scene for 1/4 hour, then fill in the details for as long as you want.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Van Gogh just randomly placed Venus in some Absinth induced stupor a week after what was predicted.
Keeping
You see, most people think of Astronomers as geek-science types, while they think of Van Gogh as an artist. And the two never meet, right? Yet many geeks out there have many different interests.
Isn't it great to be a geek!
"Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
What I never realised was how quickly van Gogh painted.
You've obviously never watched Bob Ross. That guy can churn out a masterpiece in 30 minutes.
Of course I'm sure it would have been much easier to merely look up the date of the painting in an encyclopedia, than to run all over the globe trying to pinpoint the exact time and location of the painting.
Will these guys try to figure out the various landscapes of Thomas Kinkade next?
Dancin Santa
What I never realised was how quickly van Gogh painted. That whole canvas in an hour. Even over an hour I would expect to see the star appear as a line (as in long-exposure photography).
Anyway, either van Gogh's perspective is out or that building has a very strangely shaped gable. Also, the gate posts are not parralel to the walls of the building, so either one of the references is wrong, or van Gogh's perspective is inaccurate. Given this, how can one say that he put the star in the right place?
People have too much time on their hands...
.. if only.
It seems to me that the answered the time and date that it was painted, and from that obviously you can fit it into Van Gogh's biography to know what else was happening in his life around that time. Nevertheless, it seems a little arrogant to claim that you know everything about a painting. I mean, there are psychological factors that we can never really understand -- particularly in a painter like Van Gogh.
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Van Gogh decided "I think Venus would look better a little lower"?
What if "Venus" is really an accidental splatter of paint he decided to make into a celestial object?
There goes the estimate.
I would be curious to see, based on this technology, what Starry Night would have looked like, had he painted it on my birthday. Or yours, for that matter. Or any other time. Someone should write a Starry Night generator. Yeah...
The result is perhaps mundane - when a painting was painted is not earth-shattering news.
Uhm, I hope the /. folks don't mind my pointing out that MOST SLASHDOT NEWS is not earth-shattering, or even interesting to probably 90% of the world's population.
Personally I think this is pretty cool.
Well, as long as he's an astronomer, he's also an early computer scientist. Ever looked really closely at one of his works? He used only primary colors and didn't mix them. Just like your monitor uses triads to color pixels. The placement of the strokes could be analyzed (we're talkin' lots of beowulf clusters here...) for the infinitessimal gradiations in spatial frequency that contribute to the unique colors.
It is truly amazing how the artists (poets, musicians, etc... included) of the 18th & 19th centuries informed the inventions and cultures of later centuries. There is no way any of them could have imagined the place of their art in our society--or could they? Maybe something to do with absinthe. Anybody holdin?
If you love God, burn a church!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
The thing a lot of people don't know about art is how incredibly rooted in science and natural understanding it was (I say was, because the last half of the 20th century has moved away from this). Artists grew up keenly studying nature to try to understand natural aesthetics, and developed a set of unwritten standards that are used in virtually all masterpiece paintings. While we may associate this binding of art and science only with Renaissance artists, the fact is it existed throughout art history, and art has always been about representing the world according to natural laws.
With that said, though, this painting probably wasn't painted on a specific date. It may represent a specific date, but paintings took months and months to prepare. For that one painting, van Gogh probably did no less than nine study paintings, each refining the position of every line, every stroke, and yes, the location of Venus. van Gogh could probably paint any sky he wanted to at any time he wanted to, and he would've known exactly where everything should be.
It's kind of sad, actually, that such knowledge (and training) has to be rediscovered, but such are the ways of history.
For those too lazy to use google, the painting in question can be found here.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Scully: "But Mulder, how could a man like Van Gogh reproduce a perfect copy of the starscape at a given moment, when the painting would have taken hours, if not days, to paint?"
Mulder: "Maybe a man like Van Gogh...wasn't a MAN at all!"
Scully: "Are you suggesting...?"
Mulder: "Yes, Scully. Aliens, taking the form of Renaissance artists, visited 19th century Europe, bestowing on European civilisation the Impressionist school of art, in an attempt to destroy the Neo-Classical school, with its tendency towards historical paintings, thus to prevent any historical paintings recording their many visits to earth from being recorded"
Scully: "Yeah, I guess. You know I read in the National Inquirer that that Monet dude got anally probed..."