Starry Night and the Astronauts

This is Starry Night and the Astronauts, painted by Alma Thomas, an American painter born in eighteen ninety one. It hangs here at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the number on its label is 1994.36.

A quick note before you look. It is a large canvas, about five feet tall, so give yourself some distance from it as well as some time close up.

What you are looking at is an abstract field of color, built from small, rhythmic dabs of paint, arranged in loose bands across the canvas. There is no single figure, no clear horizon. It is closer to a woven surface than a scene.

Start close. Look at one single stroke of paint. Notice that Thomas leaves a sliver of bare canvas around each mark, so the raw surface peeks through everywhere, almost like light coming from behind the paint. Now step back, as far as the room allows, and let the strokes blur together into a field. See if it reads to you as sky, or water, or something with no name at all.

Here is what most people miss. The title points you toward stars and astronauts, but Thomas herself said she painted the way it might feel to look down from an airplane, catching streaks of color rushing past too fast to resolve into things. So this can be a night sky seen from below, or the sea seen from above. The painting does not settle it, and neither should you.

One fact worth knowing. Thomas made this work at eighty years old, after turning to abstraction only in her seventies, following decades as a representational painter. That same year, she became the first African American woman given a solo show at a major art museum in the United States.

So stand where the whole canvas fits in your eyes, and let it hold still as a field of color. Then walk close enough to find just one stroke, and follow how the bare canvas breathes around it.