June 26, 2012

Van Gogh's "Starry Night" in 7,000 dominoes.



This took 11 hours of work... which makes me wonder how long it took Van Gogh to paint "Starry Night." Less than 11 hours?

23 comments:

Richard Dolan said...

Note that it is brought to us by the Guardian, England's lefty paper of record, while the video offers a paradigm of a certain concept of labor. Work should set you free and life's quite a beach when it does. Except that it rarely does.

Something there about the charms of blogging too.

edutcher said...

Amazing what you'll do to fill the time when you haven't got a job.

Interesting idea, anyway.

Unknown said...

Hush all that racket. I'm working on my unibrow.

traditionalguy said...

We'll all fall for that one. It's like the ultimate Tipping Point. We see a predestined end of the Stars in our night.

Lezer said...

And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our house flatulist Joseph, who will play for you his personal interpretation of Bach's siz-part Ricercar.

bagoh20 said...

I call bullshit!

I only counted 6,997.

bagoh20 said...

That's a great representation of the Obama jobs stimulus.

Scott said...

Oh, jeez.

gadfly said...

"Starry, Starry Night" - a view from the asylum at Saint-Remy.

And of course, we are reminded of Don McLean's beautiful ballad,"Vincent."

Tom Spaulding said...

Big deal.

Michael Moore once ate 7,000 Domino's in 11 hours.

Saint Croix said...

Oh I hate the crappy techno music. But I love the video. Particularly the part where he accidentally knocks them over. Exciting domino action! And again! And again!

I was reminded of the great short film, Slinky on a Treadmill. Both films are about man's ability to surmount great obstacles. That one had better music and it played in real time. But this one actually has a climax and a surprise ending. Plus Van Gogh rocks. One of my favorite Van Gogh paintings.

Turley on Starry Night: "It's relieved of basic decency, uncivil, and ill-informed."

Turley on the domino: "Irresponsible, and demonstrably too small."

Chip Ahoy said...

No! I have abacus. I count 7000 dominos. See? Okay, look this one. One one one ten ten ten hundred hundred click click click see? Click click click, there 7,000 dominos.

Chip Ahoy said...

You know you really start to piss me off with you number attitude first time duck now domino you have bad attitude about number.

lemondog said...

Towards the end, in the thralls of his obsession, wasn't he painting a canvas a day?

Chip Ahoy said...

You never make it restaurant business when I say thousand island I mean thousand goddamn island.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

He/she must have.. practice that.

ricpic said...

From what I've read (and who kinows whether any of this is true) it took Van Gogh three nights to paint Starry Night. It was painted plein-air and he got around the problem of darkness at night by attaching candles to the brim of his hat and possibly to the top of the canvas as well. It appears that the large dark cypress was added after he had completed the night sky since it is clearly painted over the swirling sky and doesn't appear to be wet into wet, since there is no blending of tree and sky, but rather added after the paint of the sky had dried. Frankly, I have severe reservations with the three night theory because the painting has the look of a single sustained frenzied burst. I just can't see that level of intensity maintained over three painting sessions. Plus there are no visible corrections, which fits a single go.

coketown said...

This was neat! It's good to see an English degree not go to waste. And with 11-hour stints on one's knees, a future in politics can't be far off.

Thank you, pony-tailed stranger.

JAL said...

I really enjoy stuff like that. Sent it on to the kids.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Watch for the Shoemaker-Levy collision towards the end.

Nice touch.

karrde said...

One thing about this comparison:

The creator of the domino-sculpture was trying to re-create an image that someone else had originally created. That is, he was doing the work of a mimic. He had something else to look at to see if he had created his mimicry correctly.

Van Gogh didn't have a sample image to look at and study in detail. He had the night sky, the idea in his mind of how to represent it on paper, and as much time as he could put into it. (Another commenter says 3 nights, or maybe only one night...)

Comparing the duration of the two is interesting, but you're comparing different things. Van Gogh did a work of creativity, the creators of the domino-image did a work of creative mimicry.

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ed said...

Looks boring as hell and utterly stupid. Why not simply build a robot that can take a color pattern and place the dominoes on a flat surface? Then you can sit back, drink a latte and watch while the robot does all the work.