I took this photo four years ago, standing right in front of it at the MoMA in New York, and nothing had prepared me for the real thing. Seeing The Starry Night in person is still one of the most magical things art has ever done to me... What a screen can never show you is the paint itself: Van Gogh squeezed it straight from the tube onto the canvas, building the sky in thick, raised ridges you can practically feel, so the stars and swirls stand up off the surface and catch the light as you walk by. It's not just a picture of the night sky, it's a physical storm of paint, and standing before it, everything seems to move. He made it in 1889, from the barred window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, during one of the darkest moments of his life. He wrote to his brother Theo that the night was "more alive and more richly colored than the day," and once you have seen it with your own eyes, you understand exactly what he meant...