In this article I will express the thoughts and feelings that Vincent Van Gogh's painting, Bank of the Oise in Auvers, oil on canvas, 1890. The Bank of the Oise in Auvers depicts eleven small boats on the bank of the Oise river in France. A woman is sitting on a boat, and a man and a woman are standing on the shore. I didn't wonder at the Detroit Institute of Arts trying to find a painting to write about for an assignment, but I entered the museum, hoping that a painting would notice me and speak to me. This is exactly what this work has accomplished. The work clearly caught my attention. What I noticed most was the boldness of the brushstrokes and the way the colors expressed don't carefully blend together, but rather all stand out individually. You can very easily notice the direction the strokes are going and what message they are trying to convey. There are many reasons why I chose this painting and throughout the article I will go into detail on what exactly I mean. This specific work, unframed, measures 28 7/8 x 36 7/8 inches. It's a horizontal job. This painting looks as if it were a photograph, so the relationship with the shapes on the edges seems to be unaltered and seems to go beyond the edges, so it seems unbroken. To me the colors seem harmonious, because they all seem to be "cold" colors, i.e. shades linked to the color blue. Conversely, they could also be considered discordant in some areas, for example in the upper right corner, where one senses that the artist tried to make the colors resemble some sort of forest-like background, it is not possible to distinguish exactly what the colors and brushstrokes try to express. It's not clear where... in the center of the paper... the thoughts and feelings would be mostly the heaviness and darkness of the brush strokes. It's almost as if you can feel the emotion Van Gogh felt as he painted this work. This is in fact the only work at the Detroit Institute of Art that caught my attention and made me interested in finding out why exactly the work made me feel this way. These brushstrokes were what made Van Gogh so unique, and now I understand why. They make you think and feel. No other work of art has ever done this to me successfully. Van Gogh's work represents, in many ways, the search for personal serenity, as seen in the figures relaxing on the bank of a river. What this work gave me was the knowledge to be able to understand works of art and perhaps be able to decipher what the artist is implying, and that art is much more than just a bunch of colors turned into a scene.