Erick Fishl´s Scarsdale Painting

Eric Fishl’s Scarsdale is a painting that is done on three canvases. When placed together, they appear to make one whole picture. The focal point of the painting is the woman, dressed in a white gown and veil. It appears that she is wearing a wedding dress, since the dress is white and includes a veil. To the left is a cat and to the right is a dog. The woman represents the focal point, not only because she is the largest figure in the painting, but also because everything else is slightly in darkness. Fischl’s cat and dog can only be made out if one looks at the painting carefully. Fischl also paints the woman so that she almost appears to be floating in air. One can see that she is sitting on a chair, but the dog is directly under her, and he does not really use perspective to make it clear that the woman is not floating in midair.
The composition of this painting forces the eye to the woman, and specifically to her face. Although the white wedding dress is large and takes up most of the woman’s figure, the white contrasts with her face and dark hair, forcing the viewer to look more closely into the woman’s face. She smokes a cigarette and rests her chin on her hands. She does not appear to be a very young woman and her eyes are cast down and seem sad. In general, her face appears to show a sense of disillusionment with life and specifically with her own life. Although this is apparently her wedding day, she does not seem to be happy.
Fischl creates a scene of chaos in this picture through the way he uses his paintbrush in the painting of the dress. The brushstrokes show in an untidy way, which creates a feeling that this woman’s life may be in chaos. At least, it has not gone the way she intended it to. Fischl expresses this through the sense that his brushstrokes do not seem to have gone in the way he intended them to. At the lower left part of the dress, it appears as though he could not be bothered to straighten the lines out or fix the colors. This seems to suggest that the woman, tired and disillusioned wit life, can no longer straighten it out, either. Her posture seems to follow Fischl’s painting technique and suggests hopelessness, as though she has tried everyone and nothing has made her happy.