Your brain: use it or lose it!
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!
Forest Clearing with Figures
Artist: Jan Frans van Bloemen (Flemish, Antwerp 1662–1749 Rome) (?)
Date: before 1700
Medium: Pen and brown ink, brown wash on paper backed with Japan paper.
Dimensions: 6 1/8 x 9 3/16 in. (15.5 x 23.3 cm)
Classification: Drawings
Not on view
Although the identity of the artist remains unknown, this drawing resembles the work of Jan Frans van Bloeman, one of a number of Dutch and Flemish artists who travelled to Rome in the later seventeenth century to paint the Roman campagna. These northern artists came to practice a classical style of landscape painting and draftsmanship in the manner of Claude Lorrain. In this Italianate drawing, the artist has deftly balanced light and shade, while emphasizing an intensity of sunlight in the distant clearing.
Is that snow on all the branches, sitting on the leaves? The East Coast of the USA just had a freak snowstorm and many trees that still had their leaves lost limbs or toppled over because the snow was wet and heavy. It took me 6 hours to drive home Thursday night. Normally it takes just 20 minutes. You just can’t fool with Mother Nature !
It looks like these people are out hunting with dogs. The hunters carry a long pole with them, on which they hang whatever animal they catch. Is there really snow on the ground?
The snowy parts look like winter but the non-snowy parts are very summery. Did you post this because of the freak November storm we just had?
I think it’s just bright sunlight on the leaves and ground, not snow. You can see from the shadows on the ground that the sun is off screen and to the left, as usual. The three sets of humans are headed in different directions, but they all have long poles on which they seems to be hoisting the animals that they bagged.
But I agree that the white blotches everywhere could be construed as snow. Regardless, they make this picture eye-catching.