Van Gogh typically has a limited palette of hues, and repeats simple shapes throughout his works. But this does not mean his canvasses are automatically simpler than those of other artists; on the contrary, van Gogh’s canvases are complex.
In addition to color and shape, van Gogh describes his subjects in a third way: brushstrokes. His thick application of paint leaves three-dimensional brushstrokes—a technique called impasto.
Even if the whole canvas was painted in one color, the objects would be differentiable by their various strokes. The sky is made of streaks and large globs of unbrushed paint. The wheat is small, irregular beads. And the paint of the irises in the foreground is stretched thin, so that at times the green stalks are not solid (as at the bottom center) and the purple is almost translucent in places (e.g. far right).
