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 that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
If you have another idea, run with it.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
I assume this is sunset because the cowherd is blowing a horn gathering all the wandering cows before night falls.
The brown cow in the center of the picture is surreal with all the black squiggles.\
Therefore I say this painting is a dreamscape.
wELl, NOW WE KNOW WHY mANY COWS ARE BROW N .
!!!
So there is a man standing on a rock blowing a horn. I assume it’s a man but it could also be a woman. And I see now how the word “horn” came to also mean trumpets and cornets. The man is rising up above the horizon, as are a few cows in the background. In fact the head and horns of one cow do this just to the right of the man but off in the distance.
I agree with the word “surreal” as the cows seem to be headed into ditches or lower elevations.
A dog is in the distance, it is chasing stragglers, I do believe.
The black squiggles on the front cow’s back look like stitches after an operation. How strange this picture is, so brown and dark and crazed.
Slaughter. The man is standing casually on the rock calling in the cows. His posture is relaxed, making the cows think all is right with the world. But look at the blood red sky. The cows are being led to a massive processing factory where their throats will be slit and blood will gush out so strongly, with such fierce force, that all the heavens in the sky will turn a brownish rust red, all the clouds in the sky speckled with blood splatter, and the ground turning into a ruddy bloody mud. The red blood will mix with the brown earth and flow like hot lava over the face of the earth, churning in the rivers, clouding up the oceans, rising to the skies and raining down, down, down, on all the humans who eat meat and on the baby cows who are left behind bleating and howling because their mamas were sacrificed on the twin altars of human greed and gastronomy. Carnage for carne asada in Mexico. Horrors for US hamburgers. Killings for Japan’s kobe beef. Butchering for barbecue beef, barbacoa and bulgogi. Terrors for terrible teriyaki. Fear for filet mignon. And on and on throughout human history.
Don’t you know that cows are our friends ??????
What’s interesting for me as I look at the picture and read the other people’s comments is that the brown cow in the foreground seems made of the same colors as the blood red sky. None of the other cows are colored that way.
I think Paulette is on to something.
The dominant colors of this painting – red and brown – are basically a mix of blood and poop. Isn’t that what everyone’s implying ???