Alice Neel’s painting Suzanne Moss was created in 1962 using oil paint on canvas. As the title suggests, the painting depicts a woman’s portrait. Now resigning in the Chazen Museum in Madison, WI, this portrait of a woman lunging is notable for the emotional intensity it provokes as well as her expressionistic use of brush strokes and color. The scene is set by a woman, presumably Suzanne Moss, dressed in dull back and blues lounging across a seat, staring off to the side, avoiding eye contact with the viewer. The unique style and technique of portraiture captures the woman’s piercing gaze and alludes to the interior emotions of the subject. In Suzanne Moss, Alice Neel uses desultory brush strokes combined with contrast of warm and cool shadows …show more content…
The face of the portrait is detailed, and more naturally painted than the rest of the composition. However, the left iris exceeds her eye and extends past the normal outline. The viewer can see every single brush stroke resulting in a unique approach to the capturing human emotion. The streaky texture combines with the smoothness flow of the artist’s hand creating contrast between the hair and the face. The woman’s hair is painted with thick and chunky globs of paint. The viewer can physically see the paint rising from the canvas and flowing into the movement of the waves of hair. Throughout the hair as well as the rest of the portrait Neel abandons basic painting studies and doesn’t clean her brush before applying the next color. Because of the deliberate choice to entangle the colors on the brush it creates a new muddy palate skewed throughout the canvas. Moving from the thick waves of hair, Neel abandons the thick painting style of the physical portrait and moves to a looser more abstract technique to paint the background. Despite the lack of linear perspective, Neel uses a dry brush technique for the colorful streaks in the background creating a messy illusion of a wall and a sense of space. The painting is not clean, precise, or complete; there are intentional empty spaces, allowing the canvas to pear through wide places in the portrait. Again, Neel abandons
Large and medium sizes of the forms dominate over small in the painting. The arrangement of the objects in this art piece is mostly centric. However, even though it is central, it is not symmetrical. The painter also touched the left edge of the burlap and the right bottom corner of it; this helps viewer’s eye to enter the painting smoothly, move around and escape from it. The asymmetry of the arrangement creates the sense of imbalance. Lam uses basic lines and shapes in the composition. Nevertheless, the painter creates wonderful light movement inside the figure with wavy shapes, which directs viewer’s eye from the top to the
The focal point of being the mother and appear to be true to size. In comparison, the apple, the trees and landscape in the in the distance are all represented to be true to size based on this perspective. The women being bare foot along with the child who is naked provides unity to painting as they are part of the natural landscape. All of this, gives the viewer the impression that this is a realistic picture.
Alice Neel's most talked about painting, a Self-Portrait of herself, shocked the world when she painted herself in the nude at the age of 80-years-old. Neel, a 20th Century American Portrait Artist, painted models for over 50 years before turning the attention to herself (Tamara Garb). Neel wasn't a pinup girl and had depicted herself as the complete opposite (Jeremy Lewison). Unlike Neel, women avoided self-portraits of themselves, and nude self-portraits barely made it to canvas (Tamara Garb). Because of these reasons alone, Neel's Self-Portrait attracted scrutiny (Jeremy Lewison). Though Neel declared the painting to be frightful and indecent (Ibid), it still directed its focus on femininity, and the challenges women had to endure in our
Deborah Sampson was declared in 1837 by congress that the history of the Revolution “furnished no other similar example of female heroism, fidelity, and courage”. Deborah was the real life Mulan. She disguised herself as a male soldier named Robert Shurtleff and joined the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment in 1782. Under the command of Captain George Webb, she was assigned the dangerous task of finding neutral territory to spy on the British regarding their quantity of soldier and supplies in Manhattan. Gathering this information was helpful for General Washington’s battle plans. Despite close calls on other soldier finding her true sex identity, she was discovered in 1783, a year and a half into her service. She had received a contusion on her
The first thing to notice about this painting is how incredibly involved and realistic the brushwork is. The couple’s faces are so delicately rendered. Every wrinkle is visible and every hair strand is in it’s place. The soft folds and patterns of their clothing, and the grain of the vertical boards on the house, are highly developed and reveal Wood’s incredible attention to detail. The man, especially, appears to be nearly photorealistic.
If one came close to the figure’s stomach where there’s the seafoam green, one can see the strong mark makings of the paint brushes and knife strokes, making the paint come out of the canvas. Similarly, Brown also uses big paint strokes of different colors to direct viewer’s eyes around the artwork. For instance, on the left side of the figure, there is a big vertical downward motion of a brush stroke in maroon, that connects to a green streak that goes up and encompasses the figure’s head and then downward to the body of the figure, which outlines and pushes the figure to stand out. And to make our eyes go back to the figure, Brown paints a blue triangle on the chest, making it a focal point due to it’s dark color that stands out of the light colors. And if someone stood facing the side of the painting, one can see the thick globs of paint that would make the viewer take a double glance to see if it was either a painting or a sculpture, which reinforces the idea that the painting is coming alive and making one feel
Thomas Hardy challenges the sexual principles of the late nineteenth century in his novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Tess Durbeyfield, a young woman, looks for work at Trantridge, where she meets the charming Alec Stoke-d'Urberville. Alec becomes attracted to Tess and later rapes her in a forest. This drives Tess to look for work elsewhere, and she meets Angel Clare at Talbothays Dairy, where they fall in love with each other and marry. However, when Tess tells Angel what happened to her at Trantridge, he leaves her and goes to Brazil. Hardy presents two men who inflict different types of pain on Tess; while Alec harms Tess physically, Angel harms Tess psychologically. Hardy establishes that people are victims of fate and, although both men have many faults, Angel is the better man.
Inside every human being is the desire to be evil. In society, rules and order exist for the purpose of keeping human civilization from revealing our inherently immoral sides. In William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, it is witnessed that when order is absent from society, people choose to act immorally. In fact, many of the boys fall into the hands of evil behaviour and are conquered by savagery. Whereas only three boys in the novel named Piggy, Simon and Ralph, stay true to themselves amongst the chaos of their rule-free society. As a result, the three boys are forced to endure isolation and abuse and are dehumanized by the other boys.
Judy Chicago comments in her essay that she “had been made to feel ashamed of her own aesthetic impulses as a woman, pushed to make art that looked as if it had been made by a man.” The idea that female artists were not permitted to draw from their personal experiences completely undermines the basis of what art is. Art provides context of culture: it adds meaning and relevance to the time that it was created, and the artists’ personal experiences is what drives the artwork, and society, forward. Chicago’s blatant truths about women and their art in the early 70’s describes the struggles of walking between the worlds of femininity and the regular world talked about by Woolf. It’s impossible to deny the importance of femininity. If one is not
...ause the look of curiosity of the girl extends beyond the frame. This gives the painting a sense of curiosity.
... though employing a familiar subject (the female form), shows the transformation from busy mosaics with gold embellishments to a brighter palate of colors and the use of stronger, bolder lines. The piece exemplifies his versatility as an artist.
This painting consists of regular lines as well as implied lines. Some of the regular lines that have been included are flowing, curved lines, such as the Earth that the woman is sitting on top of. Additionally, the background is made of small scenes that have been outlined by a dotted line, which places emphasis on the scenes. Besides regular and visible lines, there are a few implied lines in this painting. For instance, the woman's eyes are looking forward, so there is an implied line to the audience. Additionally, another implied line would be the woman's right arm, which is pointed towards her headpiece, while her left arm is pointed towards the earth. Nonetheless, this painting is not intense; although it does have splashes of color, this painting does not have a bright saturation. Instead, this painting is slightly dull, which makes this painting appear vintage. Additionally, since this background is a dark color, it makes the rest of painting, especially the headpiece, stand out. Besides colors and lines, even though this is a painting and there is no physical texture, there is invented texture. Upon viewing this painting, underneath the earth where the woman is sitting on, there are roots as well as grass, which give texture and feeling to the painting. In the end, this painting consists of several elements of composition, which Heffernan has done a wonderful job
Piland, Sherry. 1994. Women artists: an historical, contemporary, and feminist bibliography. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press.
...tal aspects to understand who the female subject is. Miller doesn’t used repetition; in fact, he doesn't use geometric or organic shapes at all. The lack of the use of shapes and repetition mimics the way a woman would put on makeup. Typically, makeup isn’t put on in perfect shapes, much less organically shaped patterns. The impressionist style reflects the message of this painting more accurately than a more classical style, like Cenni’s, could.
When I imagine an artist, I picture a Parisian dabbing at a sprawling masterpiece between drags on a cigarette seated in an extravagantly long holder. He stands amid a motley sea of color, great splashes of vermillion and ultramarine and yellow ochre hiding the tarp on the studio floor. Somehow, not one lonely drop of paint adorns his Italian leather shoes with their pointed toes like baguettes.