You can read about the painting all you want, but until you look at it, you don’t understand it. To me, the real focus of the picture is in the background, in the moonlight glow – the focal point for the rest of the action is there. The campfire and lighthouse become evident only after you see the moonlight, and the reflection of the moonlight off the water. Everything about this composition is about light, even in the darkness. It is everything.
Tag: painting
Tuesday
This particular work reminds me of Mrs. Hughes from Downton Abbey for some reason. I don’t know why; it just does.
Monday
There is a lot of crossover between Rococo design and Victorian Impressionism; the repression of sexuality in public while glorifying it in private, all the while alluding to it in portraiture, sketches, etc., is very similar. Renoir’s palette of ‘girly’ pastel hues and feminine lines makes this painting flirty, fresh, and inviting in a borderline naughty way.
Sunday
There is something very powerful about the nature of this work; it screams strength in solitude, but also strength in nature’s embrace. Without one, you cannot have the other. There is beauty in the madness, and softness in the darkness.
Saturday
This particular painting is very small but very mighty in its mastery of spacial acuity, color, dimensional flow, and everything else that goes with holding the attention of an audience. By far, it is my favorite of the newest additions to the collection.
Wednesday
This is like the precursor still life to all of those random still lives we saw in the 1980s that ended up in washrooms all over the USA. It’s like the Golden Girls of still lives: and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just a very specific style that’s been reused so many times over the years.
Tuesday
My artistic relationship with Max Beckmann is complicated. Some of his work is good, some of it makes me crazy. This is one of the pieces I don’t mind at all. In fact, I do rather like it. There’s a boldness about it that is refreshing and it’s not taken too seriously.
Monday
This may simply look like a bunch of squares and rectangles in a circle, but it’s really so much more than that. I’ve spent a long time trying to understand the compositional balance between the placement of the colors and the sizes of the forms and there’s just some bloody piece I’m missing. But regardless, it’s a beautiful piece of art.
Sunday
So, this particular piece speaks to me not of jazz and boogie-woogie, so much as the days of Art Deco and of the smooth lines of the Empire State building, the Chrysler Building, and so on – those paragons of delicious modernity from the late 20s and mid 30s that still loom high in the skies and make us think of better times.
Saturday
This painting is a masterclass in composition and execution. *mic drop*