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!
Sports on a Frozen River
Artist: Aert van der Neer (Dutch, Gorinchem 1603/4–1677 Amsterdam)
Date: probably ca. 1660
Medium: Oil on wood
Dimensions: 9 1/8 x 13 3/4 in. (23.2 x 34.9 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Van der Neer’s special interest in effects of light and atmosphere found an ideal subject in the winter landscape. Here the brilliant illumination of the sunset is diffused throughout the landscape by its reflection in the ice.
So, it looks like we’re back in Holland again where all the men are socializing and skating around with hockey pucks and sticks. The only woman I can identify is walking out of the frame on the left side. She’s being replaced by a new, younger man entering on the right side. How come men get to enjoy themselves so much?
Somehow the dark gray billowing clouds look like smoke, and what I assume to be the sun in the distance appears, when you magnify the picture, like a burning building or an erupting volcano.
Which makes all of the people fooling around on the ice look like fools.
are those white things sticking up from the ground in front the bones from a whale’s rib cage ???
This is a peculiar picture and I agree with the comments already made. Yes, it does look like a fire in the distance, and that does look like billowing smoke, not dark grey clouds. The curving upright white posts in the bottom foreground do look like whale bones. In addition, the way they curve up and to the right parallels the diagonal poles by the houses on the left side. The windmill in the center background makes me think this is Holland, but did other countries also have windmills? I think so.
It’s funny to assume that there’s a real catastrophe going on in the background (erupting volcano, burning building) while all these humans are skating freely and enjoying themselves on the ice.
I also like Gabby’s idea that the sole woman in the painting is exiting to the left while a younger man enters on the right to displace her. The skaters look like they’re each skating in their own private world or sharing an experience with a partner who’s with them.