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!
Long Island Farmhouses
Artist: William Sidney Mount (American, Setauket, New York 1807–1868 Setauket, New York)
Date: 1862–63
Culture: American
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 21 7/8 x 29 7/8 in. (55.6 x 75.9 cm)
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 758
An entry in Mount’s diary records that he began a painting of the houses of his brother and of one John Davis in Setauket, Long Island, in November 1862, completing it the following spring. Mount composed the work from the window of his portable studio, a specially made room on wheels, from which he directly captured convincing details and limpid natural sunlight. The dearth of genre content here is unusual for the artist, but he chose to commemorate the tranquility of the village in early spring, in contrast to the turmoil of the Civil War, which was raging at the time.
I see a farmhouse but there’s very little activity going on around it. Some children appear to be playing a game by the barn, a woman is off in the distance by the second house, and a man is fixing his sail on a boat in the water. It looks like wild turkeys are in the picture, too.
The most striking image though is the shadow of the tree falling on the house. That portends something, but I’m not sure what.
The tree looks like a skeletal hand reaching towards the house. It’s scary.
BTW is that an outhouse at the foot of the tree? What’s that contraption next to it with the plates lying upside down on it?
The dark clouds above, the dark ground at the very bottom of the picture, the dark shadows on the back of the tree as well as the tree’s shadows on the house, give this picture an air of foreboding.
Yes, the dark clouds and the spooky shadow of the tree give the painting an ominous air, but there are other interpretations, too. Imagine you’re standing in the position of the painter, and you’re coming home after a long journey. Then the picture looks warm and inviting, a home coming.
And for the record, this is one of the only instances where the sun is off screen and to the right of the frame, not the left. If the Western eye scans pictures from the left to the right (as we do in reading text), you’re going to become enmeshed in the tree and its shadow, both of which are like giant claws.