Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in 1889 while he was an inmate at a mental asylum in Arles, France. It became the best-known of his many paintings. The turbulence of the sky is often seen as a metaphor for the turbulence in the artist's psyche. But there may be more to it. A new study published in Physics of Fluids sees turbulence in the sky way beyond the 14 eddies and vortices we all notice.
The air flow in the painting is also evident in the paint strokes, which reveal a shimmering effect by the contrast in the amount of light reflected by the various shades of paint, and by the size of the strokes. We cannot say "brush strokes," because Van Gogh made The Starry Night by heaping globs of paint onto the canvas with a knife or his fingers. The physicists who studied these strokes believe that Van Gogh had an intuitive understanding of how fluid dynamics work. Others say, yeah, no, Van Gogh didn't know anything about fluid dynamics, but like many great artists, he had a preternatural talent for observation of the natural world, and he spent a lot of time outdoors. Read about the fluid dynamics that most of us cannot see, but we can feel in The Starry Night at Ars Technica.
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