Historical Context
Starry Night I chose because it caught my attention while researching Van Gogh’s other works over the summer. It may be one of his better known pieces, but I feel it gives us a truly heartbreaking yet beautiful insight into the mind of a broken man. The image he captured on canvas was an augmented version of the reality outside his window at the asylum, in a sense how he wanted to see the world through that portal, not how it actually was.
Sourced Image
Sourced Images
In Buckinghamshire there is a living history museum called COAM, also known as the Chiltern Open Air Museum, which allows you to see houses as they would have been in previous decades. Though it has since changed, when I visited some years ago they had a strict no touch rule and so had barriers blocking the doors into the rooms so that you could look but not interact. At the time I remember thinking to myself that I would have preferred to get a closer look and be able to tough some of the items in those rooms. As such, this was my inspiration for wanting to create a little piece of Van Gogh’s world that people today could experience in some way, not just look at through the glass of a display case.
I chose Van Gogh’s room at the asylum, with some additional windows to allow the secondary element to be enacted. Out of the window above his desk is a model replica of Starry Night as he painted it, while the extra window to the right looked out at the view as it would have been. The third window looks inwards at the mind of Van Gogh, instead of his art or his reality. A partially transparent, mesh portrait of Van Gogh with scattered, broken models from his home town lit behind the mesh to give a soft effect of looking through the man to where he came from, and how he saw it in his imagination.
