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 in the picture?
- What does it make you think of?
Note: To examine the picture in full size, click on the image.
When I enlarge the picture, I see two people, really tiny, standing on the shadowed ledge under the arch, which makes the arch seem really huge a force of nature to be reckoned with..
If those tiny dots are two people standing under the arch, then there are two more figures further out at sea (look again under the arch) and they appear to be approaching them. Which makes this picture eerie as you have two phantoms out at sea and two humans on the rock below the arc, so what’s the story??? Fiction! Fiction everywhere you look.
Well once again the sun is somewhat central to the picture (look at how it flashes its light on the ***underneath*** part of the stone arch) but the sun itself is off screen to the left. This happens in a lot of the art shown on this blog every Thursday. Is this a Western art thing? Do other cultures do the same thing in their art?
I like how the sprays of white foam in the foreground seem to catch the light even though they are in the shadows.
I know this picture or at least have seen ones like it before. It’s a famous beach on north France with astonishing cliffs such as this one. In the other pictures I always thought of a gigantic elephant reaching her trunk into the water for a drink but here I see no animation; just the Power and the Glory of the Natural Forces that made the Continents.
The other peoples’ comments that there are two humans standing tiny as dots on the base of the cliff should be entertained but in a way that distracts me from the Power and Glory of this Painting !!!
The most provocative aspect of this painting, since we’re always thinking about the sun in these entries, is how the sun is lighting up the underside of the cliff extension. And as I perused the comments over the weeks people keep bringing up the ideas that pictures tell a story, that pictures have a message, that pictures are arranged to show something symbolic. I believe that might be true for some artwork, but for all? Aren’t we really seeing the mind of the viewer at work? Who knows what the artist was really thinking and feeling when he/she created the work?
Anyway, this painting is gorgeous in its use of color.
On my iPhone screen the cliff has a sketchiness to it but the water is solid.