The iconic painting “Starry Night” by artist Vincent Van Gogh is one of the most recognizable pieces in art history. It is one of the most popular reprints and is featured throughout pop culture.
But Turkish artist Garip Ay thought of an ingenious and beautiful way to recreate the famed painting. Using the Turkish painting technique called “Ebru Art,” Ay recreated “Starry Night” in a bowl of water.
Yes, a bowl of water.
The practice is almost as impossible as it sounds. But through proper technique and years of training, Ay has mastered it. He described Ebru to ABC News as “the practice of applying paint to the surface of thickened water and creating patterns and images by manipulating the paint.”
Watching Ay begin to dot the water with the blues, yellows, and whites that have become indelible marks of Van Gogh’s art, it almost seems easy.
As he flicks his paint brush to speckle paint across his black water, the recreating of such a famous piece of art inside a bowl of water seemed not only possible but beautiful.
But it surely was not as easy as Ay made it look.
“The creation of my ‘Starry Night’/’self-portrait’ took about 20 minutes to create,” he explained. “The water, in addition to being thickened by carrageenan powder, was colored black for this project. It is one of the more complicated projects I have worked on, to be sure.”
The difficulty about working with such a tricky medium seems obvious; once a mistake is made, it cannot be undone. There’s no such thing as “erasing” a mistake when painting on water, so Ay had to be perfect.
And when Ay was done, he did the unthinkable — he smeared it all away.
Of course, that was not the end. Once Ay had himself a clean canvas — er, bowl — he begins to recreate another iconic Van Gogh piece: the famous “Self Portrait.”
Ay has become quite the YouTube sensation with his time-lapse videos of his curious painting technique, and for good reason.
Ay is living proof that all an artist needs is a little inspiration — and a bowl of water.
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