Dear Vincent

Dear Vincent van Gogh,

You insufferable hack.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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?
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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