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?
- What observations can you make?
Note: To examine the picture in full size, click on the image.
This is a mammoth picture when I enlarge it. Only then do I see white-shirted humans wearing large floppy sunbonnets off in the distance harvesting whatever this stuff is. Hay? Why is it growing in what looks like a permanently wet field? Or did the rain just fall and puddle the place?
Although the picture shows the work of humanity, the humans are mere cyphers in this picture. That’s something to think a bout.
The discussion on some of the earlier Thursday art raised the question of whether or not a picture tells a story or has a moral. In this picture we have the strongest beam of sunlight coming straight down out of the clouds towards the largest haystack. Is this some kind of message?
On first glance, I find it interesting that the sky is darker than the ground. The sky is mostly dark gray. The ground is a light bright luminescent green. The sun breaksk through the clouds in just a few places, not everywhere. Yet the ground looks lit up.
this looks like an awful amount of work to cut by hand this entire field and then stack the hay and pull it away on a horse drawn cart, and yet the painting itself has a kind of beauty to it
The plains where they are harvesting look like a river bed edged by low hills. I wonder where this is. The trees on the far right look funky.
It’s clear these are three space aliens down on Earth collecting the scattered remains of a fallen comrade who was ripped to pieces by Shredddirks, and the mother ship is above the clouds sending down instructions via beams of light. The mother ship may obliterate all of Earth if the Shredddirks don’t leave its colonizing fierce-force alone !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It’s intriguing to look at the edge of the painting where the canvas meets the frame. That’s where the “reality” of the picture (realistic valley, haystacks, clouds) gives way to the reality of the cloth canvas and the wooden frame its attached to. Its and unusual kind of mind trip I had not thought about before. In additionally the picture is very wide. How about that???
I get this. In the sky, the left half is dark and the right half is light. The reverse is true for the bottom half where the land is. There the left side of the picture is light and the right is dark.
Tiny humans almost overwhelmed by too much work and the forceps of nature…