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. All artwork will show a sun (or sunlight) somewhere.
I won’t name the piece or the artist, but instead invite you to study the art and post a comment addressing one or more of these questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see in the picture?
- What does it make you think of?
- What observations can you make?
Note: To examine the picture in full size, click on the image.
How remarkable that a painting made with mostly cool colors – blues, browns, greens – can create such a sensation of heat andf sunshine.
Someone or something took this lad’s clothes and threw them into a hole in the ground that led from the brown surface world that we know and live in, to a blue and teal world where enormous blue-green caterpillars fly and curl through the air without wings, and all the parakeets are white. They, the parakeets,, make a melodic chirping noise that you could almost write down as sheet music but the flying caterpillars fly with a hum and a hooooo hooooo hooooo and the boy lies on the ground and can’t believe his good fortune to pass through into this colorful brilliant place although he doesn’t realize that once he enters the blue-green water world he can not return to the brown world were he came from and he will never hear crickets chirp chirp chirping again except in his dreams. Just the parakeets. Nor will he ever feel the warm sun on his bare back and buttocks again, just a chilly chill like jelly that’s room temperature but cool to the touch nonetheless.
The blue pool looks bottomless and it doesn’t look like the young man sees his reflection. The only thing that I don’t understand is how the pool can be so blue when the world itself is so brown.
The muscular man is rendered rather realistically. The rest of the painting is wildly impressionistic, with bold dashes and suggestive washes of color. I get a fresh, refreshed feeling looking at this. Although it’s mysterious what is going down in that blue pool. Surrounded by so much brown.
I’ve come back to this page five times today. It makes me feel like hopping on a plane to the tropics. Very powerful stuff.
Brown on the top half of the painting, blue on the bottom half – – – a reverse of the typical earth/sky division. – – – – – – – btw the guy has a nice body – – – – – –
In many of these thursday art paintings, the sun is out of the picture and off to the left. Based on the shadow’s of the man’s head against the rock below him, I’d say the sun again appears to be off to the left but also high up. And I notice that not only is the sun looking down on the man, but so are we. We are above him. And he is looking down, too, into the pool of water. These are a lot of downward directions, even the man’s head is below his feet and back. Down. Down. Down.
As a consequence I sense the question, “What is down there in that blue pool”?]
And yet there’s an upward m ovement, too, as the sunlight is bouncing up at us with all the glorious colours! And my feeling is generally up as I look at this wonderful painting.
Thank you!
I think the young man is me at a younger age. Youth is carefree, exploratory, daring, sun-filled, and fortunately dumb about many things. Sweet bliss.
What about the ongoing discussion regarding whether or not a work of art tells a story or has a moral message? Is this picture a retelling of Narcissus? Is the blue pool in a brown world supposed to represent something? Do we have to analyze a picture in this way? Can’t we just enjoy the spectacular colors and vibrations and sensations they produce? Or is the artist making a statement?
This picture, because of the lovely colors, seems more enjoyable than the black and white photografs of burning sunshine creating sharply etched shadows somewhere hot and arid.
Also, talking about the story or moral of a picture takes me and probably other people away from the direct experience of gazing awestruck at a remarkable work of art, pretty or otherwise.
Narcissus stripped bare , looking into the abbess ……….
The abbess looks to be better than where he is.
Really, how does one look at a painting?