The sky in The Starry Night already feels as though it is moving. I wanted to follow that suggestion: let the painted strokes travel through their curves while the village, hills, and cypress hold the composition steady.

The study keeps the painting flat and the camera fixed. Blue ribbons follow the large hooks in the sky, and star halos circulate around their bright centers. The color and texture come from the original painting.

Following the brushwork

The central swirls have long, interlocking bends. I divided the sky into overlapping regions and used three Codex agents to trace curved stroke groups. After reviewing their boundaries and assigning shared halos to one region, the map contains 89 directed guides.

Those guides establish the large paths. Local image gradients refine their direction to follow the smaller painted marks. In the Flow panel, Show stroke directions overlays the guides and 4,371 automatically traced brush paths, making the motion map visible alongside the painting.

The finer paths estimate the orientation of the brushwork; they do not separately identify every physical stroke. The direction of travel is an artistic choice. A painted curve suggests a path, but cannot tell us uniquely which way motion should run along it.

Keeping the painting together

A WebGL shader moves the original image texture over short distances along the map. Two staggered passes blend smoothly as they restart, allowing the currents to continue without a visible cut. Where opposing streams meet, their speed falls to reduce stretching across the junction.

A SAM 3 mask protects the cypress, with additional masks holding the village, hills, church spire, and bright celestial cores still. The source image is 3,840 × 3,041 pixels, with a smaller texture for phones. The browser renders the motion directly, so movement and pace can change while it plays.

Original returns to the still painting. Full screen fills the display, and Show whole painting restores the complete composition. Reduced-motion preferences start the work paused.

After Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889, Museum of Modern Art. Source image: the Google Art Project scan on Wikimedia Commons, using its 3,840-pixel derivative.