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!
Castle by a River
Artist: Jan van Goyen (Dutch, Leiden 1596–1656 The Hague)
Date: 1647
Medium: Oil on wood
Dimensions: 26 x 38 1/4 in. (66 x 97.2 cm)
Classification: Paintings
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 965
This scene of fishermen casting their net in front of a moated fortress catered to a taste for picturesque and ancient architecture. Working on the smooth surface of an oak panel allowed Van Goyen to achieve a variety of painterly effects and enliven a limited color palette as he evoked crumbling masonry, rippling water, or cottony clouds. Although the artist studied medieval monuments in preparing such scenes, the castle shown here is imaginary, pieced together from both observation and fantasy.
I see four open-hulled boats in the foreground; my guess is that they’re fishing or gathering some other kind of seafood. The castle on the right has an entranceway that dips down into the water, so the boats can enter and exit. If you wanted to walk into the castle you’ll have to look elsewhere for an opening. It looks like a safe way to run a castle.
THe dominant colors are brown and gray Overhead the sky is also brown and gray, with lighter sunlight on the horizon on the far left.
The castle looks run down, like it’s seen better days. There’s vegetation apparently growing on the bulwarks.
The castle is rather ramshackle, and what is the looping horizontal stick at the top of the tower that the birds are perching on ???
The castle looks decrepit. The central tower interests me most, what with that bird perch near the top and what looks like a cage next to it where they can live. But all over the castle I see signs of dilapidation – – was this what castles were often like in real life?