<P> Soth uses Van Gogh's statement to his brother, that The Starry Night is "an exaggeration from the point of view of arrangement" to further his argument that the painting is "an amalgam of images ." However, it is by no means certain that Van Gogh was using "arrangement" as a synonym for "composition ." Van Gogh was, in fact, speaking of three paintings, one of which was The Starry Night, when he made this comment: "The olive trees with white cloud and background of mountains, as well as the Moonrise and the Night effect," as he called it, "these are exaggerations from the point of view of the arrangement, their lines are contorted like those of the ancient woodcuts ." The first two pictures are universally acknowledged to be realistic, non-composite views of their subjects . What the three pictures do have in common is exaggerated color and brushwork of the type that Theo referred to when he criticized Van Gogh for his "search for style (that) takes away the real sentiment of things" in The Starry Night . </P> <P> On two other occasions around this time, Van Gogh used the word "arrangement" to refer to color, similar to the way James Abbott McNeill Whistler used the term . In a letter to Gauguin in January 1889, he wrote, "As an arrangement of colours: the reds moving through to pure oranges, intensifying even more in the flesh tones up to the chromes, passing into the pinks and marrying with the olive and Veronese greens . As an impressionist arrangement of colours, I've never devised anything better ." (The painting he is referring to is La Berceuse, which is a realistic portrait of Augustine Roulin with an imaginative floral background .) And to Bernard in late November 1889: "But this is enough for you to understand that I would long to see things of yours again, like the painting of yours that Gauguin has, those Breton women walking in a meadow, the arrangement of which is so beautiful, the colour so naively distinguished . Ah, you're exchanging that for something--must one say the word--something artificial--something affected ." </P> <P> When Van Gogh calls The Starry Night a failure for being an "abstraction," he places the blame on his having painted "stars that are too big ." </P> <P> While stopping short of calling the painting a hallucinatory vision, Naifeh and Smith discuss The Starry Night in the context of Van Gogh's mental illness, which they identify as temporal lobe epilepsy, or latent epilepsy . "Not the kind," they write, "known since antiquity, that caused the limbs to jerk and the body to collapse (' the falling sickness', as it was sometimes called), but a mental epilepsy--a seizing up of the mind: a collapse of thought, perception, reason, and emotion that manifested itself entirely in the brain and often prompted bizarre, dramatic behavior ." Symptoms of the seizures "resembled fireworks of electrical impulses in the brain ." </P>

Why did vincent van gogh paint starry night