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!
[View of a Bridge leading to a House over a Body of Water]
Artist: Adolf de Meyer (American (born France), Paris 1868–1946 Los Angeles, California)
Date: 1900
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: 10.1 x 19.8 cm. (4 x 7 13/16 in.)
Classification: Photographs
The slight arch to the bridge, as well as some of the architectural features of the house, make me think this is Japan. And it’s provocative that the sky and the water are the same light grey, no telling where one ends and the other begins.
I agree with Tarona… the mood is very ethereal with the water and the sky one amassed gray wash.
Everyone has this wrong, or maybe they’re too young to know. This is a still from a Twilight Zone TV episode where people walked across this bridge, entered the house, and never came out again. An investigator went to, well, investigate, and when he opened the front door saw that the house was filled with beetles, rats and other vermin, who all swarmed over him as they live off of human flesh . The episode ended with Rod Serling sitting on an easy chair in the middle of the front room, surrounded by these creepy animals, as he gave the closing argument/deduction .
What is going on in this picture?
– Nothing seems to be going on, and maybe that’s the point.
What do you see that makes you say that?
– I can’t even see a ripple on the water. Every thing is still, and I agree with one of the other comments that says it’s eerie to find there’s no differentiation between the water and the sky.
What more can you find?
– The right half of the picture is dominated by dark, close-up forest, which gets darker the closer it gets to the right side of the picture’s edge. The house, especially the roof, stands out with it’s lighter shades. So when you cross the bridge from the right to the left you’re entering more light. But if you cross the bridge from the left to the right, you’re heading into some dark territory.