Your brain: use it or lose it!
Special Note: As we head towards the upcoming World Parkinson Congress in Kyoto, Japan, I will try to post as much Japanese artwork as possible.
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!
東海道五十三次之内 神奈川 台之景
View of Kangawa at Sunset
Artist: Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, Tokyo (Edo) 1797–1858 Tokyo (Edo))
Period: Edo period (1615–1868)
Date: ca. 1834
Culture: Japan
Medium: Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper
I see a line of people heading up the hill and it’s before sunrise. I also see two lines of boats headed out to sea. One line is under full sail, the others either don’t have their sails up yet, or are more like rowboats.
As it appears to be dawn, I sense a feeling of serenity. But I wonder if people had rough lives back then, and harsh. It makes for a lovely picture, however.
What is going on between the two women halfway up the hill? Each seems to be involved with a man. The woman farther down the hill is, like, pulling him back, and the other woman is leaning back, smiling, while her man is leaning towards her. Do the women’s white faces mean anything about them? What comes to my mind is that they’re geisha and the two men are customers who are leaving now, at dawn. And if geisha is the wrong term in this case, then maybe they’re drinking house hostesses at the end of a long night.
The sushi house at the top of the hill has the best views and scrumptious tuna rolls. The sake is good, too. I’ve been there.
Gabby: do they have take-out?
When I was in college I took an art history course. It was mostly about Western art, but one day the professor showed slides of famous traditional Japanese paintings, mostly woodblock prints. He classified Western art as frequently dealing with vertical and horizontal lines – mostly vertical (buildings, flag poles on a battlefield, the masts of sailing ships, people posed for portraits sitting straight up). Japanese art, on the other hand, he said had diagonals everywhere, and I see that here. Both lines of ships (the ones with full sail in the background, the smaller boats in the foreground) are distinctly diagonal. The hill on the right, with the line of people going up it and all the buildings, is also diagonal. And the roofs of the houses are a mass of diagonal lines.
In addition, it seems that everything in the picture (the trees on the right bending out over the water, the lines of boats in the water, the islands in the distance, the clouds above) conspires to create a circle around the sun, which is about to rise up in the distance. Are they meant to contain the sun? I don’t know.