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.
Special Update! The New York Times website does this same exercise every Monday with a news photo that is uncaptioned and contains no text (click!). The Times asks viewers the same three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
However, at the end of the week, the Times posts the background information on the picture. So, I’ve decided to do the same. I’ll still post an unlabeled piece of art on Thursday. But return on Sunday (for the Sunny Sundays post!) and you’ll find an update on the artwork here.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
Three Cartouches: Footman, Courtesan and Rising Sun
Artist: Kubo Shunman (Japanese, 1757–1820) (?)
Period: Edo period (1615–1868)
Date: 19th century
Culture: Japan
Medium: Part of an album of woodblock prints (surimono); ink and color on paper
Gee, the sun is rising in the lower right corner behind a green Japanese character that looks like a Christmas tree. The man at the top is carrying home some big and cumbersome Christmas presents, while his daughter awaits anxiously with a sly grin on her face. The man’s kimono looks cumbersome, too.
The man is lodged in what looks like a fancy dinner plate. The woman is contained in what looks like a coaster to keep cold drinks from perspiring on a wood table. And the sun is in a bookmark.
P.S. The man overlays the other two.
I think the man must be a samurai because he’s carrying a sword. It also looks like he’s got two bows and a bunch of arrows. And maybe a second sword.
I love all the borders !!
There are a lot of oblique lines going from lower left to upper right. The samurai’s sword and all the other gizmos attached to it. The wooden paddle thing the woman is holding. Her eyes. Her eyebrows. The red shading on the sun. The positioning of the lines of text. As Westerners who read horizontally from left to right and then down the page, do we unconsciously look at paintings the same way? Glancing from left to right?
The Japanese read from up to down, starting in the upper right corner and working leftwards. How does this influence how they view paintings?
The oblique lines in this painting give me an upwards lift, going from lower left in each case to upper right. It’s like a graph showing improvement.
Do people who come from other cultures where the reading/writing system flows differently, interpret lines in painting differently?