Week 8 assignment: essay – interrelationships reflection apa format | Applied Sciences homework help
- In which painting does color dominate line, or line dominate color? 2. Which painting is most symmetrical? Which most asymmetrical? 3. Which pleases your eye more: symmetry or asymmetry? 4. In which painting is the sense of depth perspective the strongest? How does the
artist achieve this depth? 5. In which painting is proportion most important? 6. Which painting pleases you the most? Explain how its composition pleases you. The ClariTy Of PainTing The Swing (Figure 4-13), Fragonard’s painting of young libertines, seems to be the picture of innocent pleasures, but the painter and his audience knew that he was portraying a liberal society that enjoyed riches, station, and erotic opportunity. This painting has been considered one of the Wallace Collection’s masterpieces. jac16871_ch04_058-090.indd 75 12/11/17 11:22 AM 76
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FIGURE 4-13 Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Swing. 1776. Oil on canvas, 35 × 32 inches. The Wallace Collection, London. This famous painting seems at first glance to be a picture of young people at play, emulating innocent children. But the eighteenth-century audience read this as a libertine and his mistress. The swing was a code for the sexual freedom of the privileged “playmates” in the painting. ©Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/ Alamy PERCEPTION KEY The Swing 1. What are the most contrasting colors in this painting? Which character is most highlighted by color? What does the color imply? 2. How is nature portrayed in the painting? What colors and contrasts seem most expressive of nature’s powers? 3. Why is the richness of the garden the best locale for this scene? What do the lovers have in common with the garden? 4. One of the men on the ground is a clergyman. One is the woman’s lover. Which is which? How does the use of color clarify the relationship? 5. The bough and leaves above the woman are mysteriously shaped. In what sense may it be a comment on the relationship of the woman and her lover? jac16871_ch04_058-090.indd 76 12/11/17 11:23 AM 77
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This painting was commissioned by a French baron who explicitly asked Frag- onard to paint the woman as a portrait of his mistress. The baron is himself high- lighted by color at the lower left looking up the skirts of his mistress. The painting established a clarity of the relationships of the figures to the eighteenth-century viewer, and of course to the characters portrayed. The figure of the man in the lower right is a clergyman who may be hopeful that the baron will marry his mistress. The small stone sculptures are classical figures, a Cupid on the left and putti in the lower center. The overabundance of the leaves and trees implies a fruitfulness and an erotic quotient illustrated by the castoff slipper and the baron’s recumbent posture. This painting has a special clarity because it is something of an allegorical rep- resentation of erotic play. Audiences today would not necessarily be aware of the specifics of the relationship of the man on the lower left with the woman on the swing. However, a careful analysis of the details of the painting—the pink dress, the man looking up her skirt, the overabundance of the vegetation, and the Cupid with his finger to his lips—and the richness of the coloration point to erotic play and erotic joy. The “all-aT-OnCeness” Of PainTing In addition to revealing the visually perceptible more clearly, paintings give us time for our vision to focus, hold, and participate. Of course, there are times when we can hold on a scene in nature. We are resting with no pressing worries and with time on our hands, and the sunset is so striking that we fix our atten- tion on its redness. But then darkness descends and the mosquitoes begin to bite. In front of a painting, however, we find that things stand still, like the red in Siqueiros’s Echo of a Scream (Figure 1-2). Here the red is peculiarly impervi- ous and reliable, infallibly fixed and settled in its place. It can be surveyed and brought out again and again; it can be visualized with closed eyes and checked with open eyes. There is no hurry, for all of the painting is present, and under normal conditions it is going to stay present; it is not changing in any significant perceptual sense. Moreover, we can hold on any detail or region or the totality as long as we like and follow any order of details or regions at our own pace. No region of a painting strictly presupposes another region temporally. The sequence is subject to no abso- lute constraint. Whereas there is only one route in listening to music, for example, there is a freedom of routes in seeing paintings. With The Swing (Figure 4-13), for example, we may focus on the overhanging trees, then on the figure on the lower left, and finally on the woman in her pink dress. The next time, we may reverse the order. “Paths are made,” as the painter Paul Klee observed, “for the eye of the beholder which moves along from patch to patch like an animal grazing.” There is a “rapt resting” on any part, an unhurried series, one after the other, of “nows,” each of which has its own temporal spread. Paintings make it possible for us to stop in the present and enjoy at our lei- sure the sensations provided by the show of the visible. That is the second reason paintings can help make our vision whole. They not only clarify our world but also jac16871_ch04_058-090.indd 77 12/11/17 11:23 AM 78
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may free us from worrying about the future and the past, because paintings are a framed context in which everything stands still. There is the “here-now” and rela- tively speaking nothing but the “here-now.” Our vision, for once, has time to let the qualities of things and the things themselves unfold. absTraCT PainTing Abstract, or nonrepresentational, painting may be difficult to appreciate if we are confused about its subject matter. Since no objects or events are depicted, abstract painting might seem to have no subject matter: pictures of nothing. But this is not the case. The subject matter is the sensuous. The sensuous is composed of visual qualities—line, color, texture, space, shape, light, shadow, volume, and mass. Any qualities that stimulate our vision are sensa. In representational painting, sensa are used to portray objects and events. In abstract painting, sensa are freed. They are depicted for their own sake. Abstract painting reveals sensa, liberating us from our habits of always identifying these qualities with specific objects and events. They make it easy for us to focus on sensa themselves, even though we are not artists. Then the radiant and vivid values of the sensuous are enjoyed for their own sake, satisfying a fundamental need. Abstractions can help fulfill this need to behold and treasure the images of the sensuous. Instead of our controlling the sensa, transform- ing them into signs that represent objects or events, the sensa control us, transform- ing us into participators. Moreover, because references to objects and events are eliminated, there is a peculiar relief from the future and the past. Abstract painting, more than any other art, gives us an intensified sense of here-now, or presentational immediacy. When we perceive representational paintings such as Mont Sainte-Victoire (Figure 2-4), we may think about our chances of getting to southern France sometime in the future. Or when we perceive May 3, 1808 (Figure 2-3), we may think about similar massa- cres. These suggestions bring the future and past into our participation, causing the here-now to be somewhat compromised. But with abstract painting—because there is no portrayal of objects or events that suggest the past or the future—the sense of presentational immediacy is more intense. Although sensa appear everywhere we look, in paintings sensa shine forth. This is especially true with abstract paintings, because there is nothing to attend to but the sensa. What you see is what you see. In nature the light usually appears as ex- ternal to the colors and surface of sensa. The light plays on the colors and surface. In paintings the light usually appears immanent in the colors and surface, seems to come—in part at least—through them, even in the flat, polished colors of a Mondrian. In Arshile Gorky’s Untitled 1943 (Figure 4-14), the light seems to be absorbed into the colors and surfaces. There is a depth of luminosity about the sensa of paintings that rivals nature. Generally the colors of nature are more brilliant than the colors of painting, but usually in nature the sensa are either so glitter- ing that our squints miss their inner luminosity or so changing that we lack the time to participate and penetrate. To ignore the allure of the sensa in a painting, and in turn in nature, is to miss one of the chief glories life provides. It is espe- cially the abstract painter—the shepherd of sensa—who is most likely to call us back to our senses. jac16871_ch04_058-090.indd 78 12/11/17 11:23 AM 79
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Study the Gorky. Then reflect on how you experienced a sense of the rhythms of your eyes as you moved across and through the painting, aware of the various shapes and their colors. The rhythmic durations are “spots of time”—ordered by the relationships between the regions of sensa. Compare your experience of this painting with listening to music. What music might be “illustrated” by this painting? FIGURE 4-14 Arshile Gorky, Untitled, 1943–1948. Oil on canvas, 54½ × 64½ inches. The power of Gorky’s red is dominant in the painting. The interruptions of the indefinite dark-colored objects offer a contrast that makes the red even more powerful. A close look at the painting shows the levels of color in the brushstrokes that reveal layers of color beneath the surface. We see yellows and light blues and tints of gray, but they all make us aware of the sensa that clarify our understanding of Gorky’s red. ©2017 The Arshile Gorky Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Art Association Purchase, Contemporary Arts Council Fund jac16871_ch04_058-090.indd 79 12/11/17 11:23 AM 80
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inTensiTy and resTfulness in absTraCT PainTing Abstract painting reveals sensa in their primitive but powerful state of inno- cence. This makes possible an extraordinary intensity of vision, renewing the spontaneity of our perception and enhancing the tone of our physical existence. We clothe our visual sensations in positive feelings, living in these sensations instead of using them as means to ends. And such sensuous activity—sight, for once minus anxiety and eyestrain—is sheer delight. Abstract painting offers us a complete rest from practical concerns. Abstract painting is, as Matisse in 1908 was beginning to see, an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which might be for every mental worker, be he businessman or writer, like an ap- peasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.1 PERCEPTION KEY de Kooning, Gorky, and O’Keeffe 1. De Kooning’s Woman I (Figure 4-11) is, we think, an example of timelessness and the sensuous. O’Keeffe’s Rust Red Hills (Figure 4-12) also emphasizes the sensuous, especially the rich reds, browns, and blue. What makes one painting presumably more timeless?