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 embiggen the image, click on it!
What’s “happening” in t his picture seems clear to me: The young man on the left is about to push the older man into th “Live” tree which is reaching out its tentacles, that is to say its branches and roots, to gobble the old man up in its large and gaping pie hole. What else could it mean? There is no other conclusion possible !!! The young man is clearly in cahoots with the tree and probably “seduced” the older man to coming along with him to “gaze at the Moon” but if the old man had actually read the newspapers recently, instead of spending all his time playing Candy Crush, he would have known that the young man was wanted in connected with a string of murders and that thhis park, this mountain path, was where many another old man was last seen.
People never learn until its too late !
Stay away from that evil tree !
!!!!!!!!!
I can make three observations.
The sky looks purple.
The moon’s crescent of light seems impossible as it stretches around the rim more than halfway.
The big tree looks like it came from a Disney cartoon. I almost expect it to come alive, or to have owls and bats fly out of the deep dark hole in the trunk.
One more point. The older man seems to represent the only vertical line in the picture. Especially with his straight up and down cane. Everything else is at an oblique angle and curved. The younger man on the left is curved, too, making him at one with the scenery and the curved cresent moon.
This is like some of the other Thursday art. Everything is posed, everything placed just so.
By the way, who are the two guys ? What’s there story ? Is this a gay scene ?
Is the mood supposed to be anything but scary ? That tree on the right is over the top !
On my big computer monitor when I click on the painting and then click again with the magnifying glass thing I am amazed at how beat up and scratched the painting is.
I can also see the raw canvass at the edges and how the canvass is crudely folded over the frame in the upper two corners.
When I pull back again and look at the painting in miniature, the white nicks and scratches now seem like tiny snowflakes or dandruff or fairy dust. And then I fall into the magical world of the story the painting suggests and the scene and mood it portrays.
The moon is ” below ” the two men’s heads. They are looking down at it. The two root-like branches of the tree seem to be tossing the moon in the air like a ball. Like a grapefruit.
I think if you folded the picture in half length-wise, opened it, then folded it in half again width-wise and opened it, you’d create with the creases the painting’s four quadrants or sections. I think you’d find that the moon is in the bottom left quadrant, an unusual place for something usually high in the sky.
I wonder why you posted this somber painting right around Thanksgiving time, which is supposed to be warm, family-oriented and happy.
Hi Everybody,
This forrest has been visited by humans before, if you look at some of the branches in the tree you will see that they were sawed neatly off. Also the tree trunk on the left was sawed neatly off.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Thank you very much for this picture !
I think these two men are telling each other secrets while they stare at the moon !
Maybe, the young man on the left is whispering his secret recipe for oyster stuffing for the Thanksgiving turkey ! And they are also discussing who to invite and who will sit where at the big dining table !
That’s my guess !
Thank you, again !
Creepy? Spooky ? Maybe . Maybe not ! It all depends on your own mind and where it’s at. !
I wish I still painted as a hobby.
I love the individual blades of grass along the path they’re so precise, and the way the tree’s bark has texture because the artist combined different shades of brown and black and orange in a single brushstroke.
Looks like a warm day and night for Thanksgiving — at least where I am in Boston — and a warm night for the two gentlemen in the painting.