Every Thursday, as part of my personal “enriched environment” initiative, I post a piece of art, usually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently released online some 400,000 high-resolution images of its collection. I won’t name the piece or the artist, but instead invite you to study the image and write a comment about what you see or what it makes you think of. All images will have a sun (or sunlight) in them somewhere.
So study the picture, and leave your reflections below!
Light slicing thru shadow. The main girl in the center is stretching up out of the shadow. The boy on the left is completely contained in the shadow but his face is lit from the side. The cliffs in the background look like Roman ruins. So many canes/walking sticks. To beat snakes with?
The poses are all so crazy. What is the author saying about these people???
As someone else noted with last week’s picture, in this painting there are no strictly vertical or horizontal lines, even with the canes. The subliminal suggestion is that there’s a lot of off-kilter movement going on. Even the woman lying down seems busy. And the upright woman stretchingg above the shadow line is only SUGGESTING that she’s still as a statue. Her upraised arms parallel the ruins behind her. In both color and angle. The message is upward bound but at a slant.
I see a lot of near parallel (almost parallel) lines in this painting. For example the main girl’s raised arms are parallel. Her cane and the boy’s cane are almost parallel. In the distance on the right are two people standing on an outcropping of a cliff. The ground below them is a straight line that is parallel with the straight line of the outcropping just above their heads. The light brown rocky cliffs suggest parallel lines in many cases. And once again the cliffs make me think of cake.
Crazy, just crazy