Vincent Van Goghs Starry Night and Hans Hofmanns Spring Essay

Vincent Van Goghs Starry Night and Hans Hofmanns Spring - Essay Example The essay "Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Hans Hofmann’s Spring" discovers two paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and Hans Hofmann. Despite the similarities in the titles to the two works of art, they reveal a differences which reflects on the artist as a person and as an artist given expression to his experience and perspectives. Where Van Gogh looked to create work that was an interpretation of life through his own deeply emotional brush, Hofmann's works were directed at all expressions that his audience could relate to. However, since art is both an expression of mood/emotion and the artist’s own experiences, the contextual backgrounds of both Hofmann and Van Gogh help to explain why similar titled paintings convey different emotions. Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was an iconic nineteenth century Dutch painter of the post-impressionist movement. Van Gogh was a deeply religious man, known for his struggles with mental illness (Blumer: 519). Van Gogh’s let ters and accounts of his life indicate that he suffered episodes of high energy and moods swings that are consistent with Bipolar Disorder. In the last two years of his life, a French doctor diagnosed Van Gogh with ‘temporal lobe epilepsy’. Still, Van Gogh’s life is described as ‘extraordinary’ due to his special artistic talents. After studying in Belgium, he spent time in Paris which exposed him not only to both the classical and then modern works of the French avant-garde, but as a metropolitan city exposed him to the Ukiyo-e style of Japan.