Exercises: Starry Night

These exercises are designed awaken the core skills of compositional analysis, some of which you will already have. The way we decode images is an intuitive one that most of us will learn perhaps before anything else, even as babies.

Exercise 1: Describe

Look at van Gogh’s Starry Night. You’ve probably seen it before, maybe in passing, maybe in an art class, or maybe you’ve looked at it up close and personal for twenty minutes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. You might know a few things about it already, or something about the mythology of its painter and his life.

Forget all that. Instead, start writing. Set a timer for ten minutes. Describe everything you can about the painting, the colors and how they change, the brush strokes and how they move, the shapes and lightness and darkness and the feelings it evokes and how it does so.

Exercise 2: Draw

Reread your description. Observe what you focused on first. What did you focus on second? What drew you from one to the other? Answer these questions in your mind as you analyze your own response to the painting.

Then make a drawing. Draw a frame the same shape as the Starry Night painting. Inside the frame, circle the area of the frame where your eye went first when you looked at the painting. We’ll call this the first focal point. Then draw a circle around the second point your eyes stop at, and draw a line between the first and second focal points. Do this until you’ve charted the route your eye takes across the whole of the painting, noting where it ends.

Exercise 3: Explain

Once you’ve completed these two tasks, you’ll have a diagram of the way you “read” this painting, and you’ll have an explanation of the way you see the painting in front of you. Write a final paragraph without a timer that explains why your eye moves from each point to the next. Find your reasons within the painting: which line, which color shift, which figure looking in a particular direction causes you to move from point to point.

In the next section, we’ll discuss the compositional techniques that are used to control your eye and give them names so we have a shared language for explaining them.