This image from Waterhouse illustrates the story of “St. Eulalia”. Not being familiar with this story, I googled it and apparently it is the story of a young virgin who was beat, tortured and eventually crucified for not renouncing Christianity. As the story goes, she was finally decapitated and a dove fly from her neck. Analyzing Waterhouse’s treatment of the central figure, it is obvious that he did not intend to illustrate the horror of this girl’s tribulations, but rather decided to depict the “aloneness” of her situation. You see the girl centrally located in the foreground, surrounded by a mass of white which brings your attention to her, yet all the other figures in the piece are removed from her, being either held at bay by the roman guards or having the guards themselves disregarding this site. Doves has been added as details being the only living things sharing her space in the frame. I also noticed the positioning of her legs which seemed odd to me at first. I think this was done for two reasons. One, if they were postioned straight, a symmetry would have been create which creates more stability and less drama. Also, having her feet point towards the people would have connected her to them and diminish the the feeling of solitariness. Therefore, I have learned from this picture that figure positioning itself can be used as a tool to create drama.
Author: markharchar
Joseph Mallord William Turner
Turner. What can I say about Turner? If you have ever stood in front of an original Turner, you will understand. I have had the please of seeing the Burning of Parliament in the Philadelphia museum of Art. It was huge, 8 feet by 6 feet perhaps. The paint was so thick in spots that it was almost hard to image how he was able to manipulate that much paint and still have it flow the way he wished. So then, I upgraded my Dish Network to HD and got free HD channels for a month. There was an HD Art channel and I was exposed to an hour long program of Turner art on my widescreen in HD. Unbelievable. I was a fan. What I learned from that TV program was the extend of the body of work or Turner that I was unfamiliar with. So in searching, I came across this painting today. It is called “Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus – Homer’s Odyssey”. I found two versions of this image and not having seen it in person, it is hard to know what the original looks like. However, based on my Philadelphia experience, I would tend to believe that the first image is more accurate. The colors and vibrancy of the Burning of Parliament seem to be mirrored more closely in the top image. It also teaches me that the images found on the internet cannot be trusted for accuracy in color or intensity, so I am grateful that I have seen an original Turner for comparison. The thing that attracted me to this particular image, I believe is that it has a certain illustrative quality to it due to the boat details and the vibrancy of the colors. I brings to mind my childhood and watching Fox’s Peter Pan and the Pirates on TV. It evokes those memories for me. Turner has a nearly unparalleled ability to create an illusion of light in his works. He is able to generate a huge amount of warmth in the wood, sails of the ships and reflections on the water and then contrasts that warmth with the coolness of his clouds, water and rocks. My recommendation is that everyone should spend more time studying Turner, especially in person.
Alan Lee
Alan Lee is probably best known for his illustrationsof J.R.R. Tolkien’s, the Lord of the Rings. In looking through his work in order to choose one to analyze today, I found this scene in which I believe Gandolf is the one on horseback and he is speaking to or leading a band of Hobbits or dwarves. Something about this image felt familiar and I realized that it reminded me of a painting called “The serpent and the Rose” by one of my IMC instructors, Donato Giancola. In that piece, Donato used the shape of the tree limbs to frame the action in a circular fashion, that subject being figures on horseback. It seemed to me that Alan Lee was using a similar composition, in his case, having the tree limbs encircle the figures at the center of the image. In addition, the atmospheric effect of the figures in the distance add a value contrast to the darker foreground, reinforcing the mechanism that leads your eye to the subject. I have learned that this circular geometric form in a composition is very powerful and can very effectively draw the viewer’s eye to wherever it is located. I have actually employeed this element in my last two paintings. And on a side note, look at the foliage detail in the foreground of Alan Lee’s painting here. The texture is wonderful pronounced, let with all that detail, the eye is still focused on the center of that circle.
Caspar David Friedrich
Graveyard Under Snow. 1826. Caspar Friedrich is a very interesting painter to me in that I always describe him to people as “Tim Burtonesque”. In reality, Tim Burton would have been more “Friedrichesque”, but I think the comparison is illustrative. I am familiar with some work by CDF, but this piece is one that I came across today for the first time. Something grabbed my attention, so I spend some time looking at it to try to figure out why. I have touched on this topic before and I image that I will see characteristics repeated in many paintings, but I believe that the idea of narrative is what is attractive to me in this piece. We see what appears to be a graveyard marked by the stone wall in the background and the freshly dug grave. Two shovels are in the grave and the psyche begins to want details to fill in the blanks. Questions are asked, where is this graveyard. Who is being buried here. Where are the two people that were using the shovels. Is this a fresh grave or once frozen over from a time when the ground was able to be broken. It seems to me that the power of this piece is not what is pictured here, but what is actually absent. Like a monster movie where the creature is scarier when it is unseen and unknown, mystery can also be generated by the unseen. I may have to ask myself when next at my easel, “What shouldn’t I paint today.”
Henry Fuseli
This is The Nightmare. Fuseli painted in the late 1700s and was a teacher of Edwin Landseer for one and was a big influence on William Blake. He was a German born painter, schooled in Italy and eventually became an instructor at the Royal Academy. This piece is very indicative of his work and has a very dark quality to it. We have a woman in the throws of a dream being visited by a “mare” and a goblin. I am not really sure how to analyze this painting as it is attractive to me on many levels. I think what what best bet on this on is to try to identify the things I like. I like the limited palette. Yellow ochre, white, alizarin crimson seem to be the major hues and are not very saturated which adds to the night-ish feel. The high contrast between the gown of the female and the black background darkness adds alot of drama to the piece. The manical grin on the mare and the odd way the goblin seems to stare out of the painting at the viewer adds a level of discomfort to the viewer while intiguing them to look more closely. The handling of the drapery is exquisitely done from the sheerness of the gown to the folds and shadows of the drapery. This is an artist that merits deeper study.