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!
What is going on in this picture? Well, you just missed it. A dragon scrambled inside, it’s her home, and she just came back from swallowing a few of the villagers in the valley behind the mountains. Unfortunately one of the villagers, the baker, had just drunk about a gallon of high alcohol content beer, and now the dragon is feeling woozy and will probably have to sleep it off for a few days. Whew! At least the villagers can go about their business tonight without worrying about being fried to a crisp by the dragon’s fire-y breath! But she’ll probably wake up with an upset tummy, which means, WATCH OUT !!!!!
If it’s cool inside the cave, I volunteer to go in and keep the dragon company. The temperature where I am is over 100 degrees.
When you ask “What is going on in this picture?” and the picture is pretty static (no humans or animals doing anything), all I can say is that the sun is beating down on much of the picture but not all — see the shadows. The clouds are hanging in the sky and maybe they’re moving but I can’t tell. Perhaps there is a temperature differential with the parts directly in the sunshine one temp, and the parts in the dark cave another temp. I recall walking into caves and being struck by not only cooler temps but thick humidity, too.
BTW the sun is off screen and to the left. As usual!
I recall Belgian monks fermenting cheese in a cave where I used to live. Wonder if we’d find some here?
Maybe those two tree-like bushes at the top center of the picture are rising up trying to catch the sun’s rays. They almost look like aliens from another planet. Maybe they are trying to communicate with the sun, telling it to “park” a little closer because they want to warm up the cave before venturing inside.
…..?
If I squint my eyes and look at the picture ( something my art teacher had us do ) the rock face of the wall leading into the cave, the part of the wall that’s in the sunshine, looks humanoid, like a cubist brown and gray metallic crash-test dummy, leaning back, facing to the right of the picture, its two gray arms folded up against its chest, hands clenched in a fist.
Oftentimes I squint at paintings because that where I see the hidden, “real” message.