a sense of place

     

These are both paintings by Edward Hopper, a master of setting a mood and creating a sense of place where you can not only see the figures but even the air that the room holds is given a value... a texture... a feeling.  These paintings both hold one figure in a room, but although they are made with very similar styles the feeling conveyed is completely different.

The woman on the bed sits looking out the window, breathing in the fresh morning air as the sun streams into her room and warms the surface of her bed and her cheeks on her epraiser face.

The girl at the table seems chilled sitting in a room with a miniscule raidiator that does not seem to be warming the room at all, she grasps her tea cup for warmth and looks down at it pondering the heat that it holds.  She is bundled up in her heavy jacket and although she seems to have found comfort in her seat as she huddled up around warm things the chilly, dim room overpowers the small offset of warmth that she presents.  

-body language of the woman... one open to the presumably warm air around her 

and the other a bit more closed off and small, her white skin given goose bumps by the cold air of the room

-color... the light of the painting on the left is yellow and warms the room

while in the painting of the cafe the light is artificial (it is night and lamps light the room) but is does not shine yellow or orange it is white light like that of a winter day when the air is cold.

-the imagination could carry... the woman on her bed hears the sounds of morning, the streets awakening and the occasional chirp of birds. A much brighter atmosphere than that of the that of the cafe that would be somewhat quite, cold with quiet chatter of other customers and the clinking of tea and coffee cups.

a famous painting

Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp has captured movement. The figure crosses the painting, this mmovement allows the eye to travel with ease across the canvas. It is an abstract depiction of a nude subject decending a staircase and a beautiful and unique one at that. With any abstract piece come an opinion, a vision and value in the artists ideas and thoughts. It is stylized therefor no one can copy it, no one can perfectly replicate a personal style or opinion, because every opinion is unique (i believe that this adds value). Artists with opinions and different visions from the rest show another side to the world and this is valuable and interesting for the viewer.

movement captured

Duchamps style is geometric, cubic and done in dense developed layers. One wonders how he has created sush shapes, the canvas hops soft movements accompanied by bold geometric shapes. It is a balanced composition throughout the canvas, with a mixture of swift stokes and sharpe complete shapes. It is an interesting piece full of quuestion in his process which layers came first, such a fluid compostion to create this moving beauty. A piece that provides a visual you can explore and wonder about... mind bogling.

This piece holds futurist styles of it's time (1912). The major style of this time was cubo-expressionism. most deffinitally influenced by his fellow arts of his time, picasso and georges Braque the style was depicted in both mediums of painting and sculpture. it depicted movement in music and literature. This style lead to the surrealist movement. Artists were recording their opions in a modern manner, full of opinion creating new-age, untraditional and unconventional images. Radical artists.

Ambiguous space and shapes that one was left to interpret. This piece holds vast opinion therefore holding unmeasurable value in society.