Your brain: enjoy it and 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!
Susaki yuki no hatsuhi 東都名所 洲崎雪之初日 New Year’s Sunrise after Snow at Susaki, ca. 1831
Utagawa Hiroshige Japanese
Artist: Utagawa
Hiroshige (Japanese, Tokyo (Edo) 1797–1858 Tokyo (Edo))
Period: Edo period
(1615–1868)
Date: ca. 1831
Culture: Japan
Medium: Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper
Dimensions: 8 1/2 x 14 in. (21.6 x 35.6 cm) Classification: Prints
So they have April snow storms in Japan? It’s happened here, too. Horrible!
The set of buildings in the middle of th e picture look like they’ re sitting on the shoulders of two dragons whose bodies connect the building s to the mainland.
I looked and looked but could find no actual humans in this picture, but I did find what seems to be a series of snow-covered roofs along the left side of the shore line.
I’m still hung up on the observation a few weeks ago about the prevalence of diagonal lines in traditional Japanese art vs. the dominance of vertical (and I guess horizontal) lines in much of traditional Western painting. Here the only horizontal line is the horizon. But diagonals are everywhere , from the two spits of land leading to the islet where the huge house is, to the trees growing on the islet, the foot bridge, and the curvy line of red cloud. Furthermore, the horizontal horizon is offset by islands on the right just below the horizon, and landforms on the left just above. Of course, the calligraphy in the upper right corner is all done in vertical lines. That’s maybe what sets it off from the rest of the picture.