Dear Vincent van Gogh,
I have recently, to the misery of my entire Christmas vacation, completed a study of one of your works. The work, entitled The Starry Night, was one of the most needlessly complex and tediously horrid pieces I have ever had the displeasure to work with. Following are my complaints:
- You smudged almost all of your lines. Good lines are crisp and sharp, but in this painting everything just smears together in one big mess.
- There isn’t any green in the sky. Putting green in the sky is misleading and really not very accurate. Yet, here I see great smudges of green and brown and other colors up in the sky where they don’t belong. Why?
- That weird brown turd thing on the left side doesn’t look much like a tree. The smears of paint are needlessly complex, but somehow fail to give it any sort of distinguishable textures. I really thing the painting might be better if we just edit that out.
- I’ve never seen the night sky where you live, but I don’t believe those big bright swirly things can possibly be accurate. Also, they make puzzle piece orientation extremely difficult when that entire expanse of sky is all that’s left to complete.
- Many of the puzzle pieces were shaped such that they would fit in quite a few different locations in the puzzle. This led to all manner of confusion and a very frustrated puzzler. I realize that you personally may not have cut these puzzle pieces, but it’s your painting so I am holding to accountable for its processing and distribution.
Learn to paint, van Gogh. Take some lessons or something. Maybe with some effort you will be able to paint something a little more realistic that will make a much easier puzzle for my family and me to work on next year.
I will admit that Starry Night is a great painting, and if you expect it to only be enjoyed as a painting, then I suppose it is probably one of the greatest in the history of art.
It’s a terrible puzzle, though. Terrible.
Yours truly,
Anthony W. Eichenlaub
Fun post. Starry Night is my favorite painting. Now I want to get that puzzle!