Your brain: use it or lose it!
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 that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
If you have another idea, run with it.
Special Update! The New York Times website does this same exercise every Monday with a news photo that is uncaptioned and contains no text (click!). The Times asks viewers the same three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
However, at the end of the week, the Times posts the background information on the picture. So, I’ve decided to do the same. I’ll still post an unlabeled piece of art on Thursday. But return on Sunday (for the Sunny Sundays post!) and you’ll find an update on the artwork here.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
Allegory of Winter
Artist: Jacques de La Joue the Younger (French, Paris 1686–1761 Paris)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: Irregular, 39 1/4 x 41 5/8 in. (99.7 x 105.7 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906
Not on view
La Joue was a painter of ornament and architectural subjects. This canvas was designed as an overdoor and may have been one of a series representing the Four Seasons. The arabesques at the base and the curving balustrade are characteristic of Rococo design.
This is very appropriate in an adult way for Halloween. I want to know the story about it, but first let me create my own. THe wild boar;s head that the main figure is sitting on is MOST intriguing.
This is a mixture of eroticism and fear. The woman is nude and Cupid is with her,but the trees encircling her are right out of a horror film, and it looks like the woman is erotically enamored of the red hot sun..
I notice that the bottom of the frame is not straight across. It dips down twice, as if the roots of the two trees on either side of the painting were pushing the boundaries. What’s the purpose of that?
It’s interesting how much circularity is in this painting. The branches of the tree on the left curve around and almost touch the branch of the three on the right. I see round, pumpkin-like pods under the woman, and below that there is a round indentation in the chair she is sitting on, and the indentation has a man’s face with his mouth open in a large O. And of course you have the orb in the sky : the sun. A MOST MYSTERIOUS PAINTING !!!!