This stunning painting imagines the real sky that inspired The Starry Night

Vincent Van Gogh's The Starry Night evokes much of the majesty of the night sky while presenting it in a new and deeply individual light. Alex Ruiz's digital painting reinterprets Van Gogh's work, imagining how the sky might have looked the night the artist was inspired to paint it.

Ruiz is a digital concept artist who works on characters and creatures as well as environments. In this painting, he seeks to capture something of Van Gogh's experience, so that we might begin to see what the Dutch painter saw:

This is an homage to him, and to his painting, one of my all time favorites. We see him standing here, looking up at the night sky...probably in awe, as he wondered how he would capture the beauty he saw. As well, this was the view from the sanitarium he was staying at, as it's well known that the poor guy was quite mentally troubled.

Although Ruiz wanted to strive largely for realism, he also put a bit of magic in the painting, exaggerating the size of the moon and stars, and giving the clouds an ethereal quality. It would be interesting to get a astronomical take on the sky Van Gogh might have painted, but Ruiz offers some of the natural beauty that might have lit his mind.

Ruiz offers digital painting tutorials on his blog and has prints and cards of his Starry Night for sale at Fine Art America.

Starry Night [Fine Art America via Oddity Central]