Analysis of Thomas Birch’s painting An American Ship in Distress

738 Words2 Pages

Analysis of Thomas Birch’s painting An American Ship in Distress

Examining the formal qualities of Thomas Birch’s painting An American Ship in Distress was very interesting. This paper will analyze and illustrate what I saw in this particular piece of artwork. The paper will also discuss the art elements such as line, shape, color, texture, scale, and composition of the artwork.

I chose the art piece entitled An American Ship in Distress because it looks pretty amazing. Another reason I chose to analyze this piece as opposed to the others is because it was the piece I liked the most, therefore making me analyze it more closely and discover other aspects of the work would make me appreciate it more. I also chose this because I enjoy being on boats and this really caught my attention. In this art work it shows a ship being tossed around by the stormy ocean waves. The artist who painted this piece is named Thomas Birch. The medium is an oil painting on canvas. This painting was made in 1841 and it’s from the Putnam Foundation. This work does fit into a genre and it’s a waterscape.

The subject of this artwork is a shipwreck. I see it looks like a storm in the ocean and there’s a ship but the ships mass and sails appear to be damaged. The crew is lowering lifeboats, suggesting that they have to abandon ship. A rescue boat is coming in on the right side of the painting and another boat and ship are coming in on the left side of the painting to help the crew from the distressed ship. There also appears to be a lighthouse at a distance. The action being conveyed is the waves crashing into the ship. The darkness in the waves and the colors he used made them seem like there real ocean waves. The art piece does seem to be telling ...

... middle of paper ...

...hese repeated vertical lines contrast firmly with a horizontal line that divides the canvas almost exactly in half. The background, upper portion of the canvas, seems unchanging and flat, whereas the foreground and middle ground of the painting have a lot of depth to them.

The colors used in this painting are blue, white, yellow, brown, black, green, light blue. The colors Birch used seem dark in order to relate to the storm. By making it seem dark it really captures the mood of the composition. In general the quality of light in this painting is low.

Overall the artist does make a unified scene in this composition. Birch used these principals of design to make his composition more effective like balance, movement, repetition and unity. The composition seems balanced because most of the subjects in the painting are all equally distributed and proportioned.

Show More
Related

  • Un Coq Pour Chango: The Oracle And The Green Bird

    634 Words  | 2 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • The Glory of the Light Within by Dale Terbush

    680 Words  | 2 Pages

    At the left-bottom corner of the painting, the viewer is presented with a rugged-orangish cliff and on top of it, two parallel dark green trees extending towards the sky. This section of the painting is mostly shadowed in darkness since the cliff is high, and the light is emanating from the background. A waterfall, seen originating from the far distant mountains, makes its way down into a patch of lime-green pasture, then fuses into a white lake, and finally becomes anew, a chaotic waterfall(rocks interfere its smooth passage), separating the latter cliff with a more distant cliff in the center. At the immediate bottom-center of the foreground appears a flat land which runs from the center and slowly ascends into a cliff as it travels to the right. Green bushes, rough orange rocks, and pine trees are scattered throughout this piece of land. Since this section of the painting is at a lower level as opposed to the left cliff, the light is more evidently being exposed around the edges of the land, rocks, and trees. Although the atmosphere of the landscape is a chilly one, highlights of a warm light make this scene seem to take place around the time of spring.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Old Stagecoach By Eastman Johnson

    880 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Old Stagecoach by Eastman Johnson The work that I chose to talk about was “The Old Stagecoach by Eastman Johnson.” This work would be considered a painting. The images that are shown in the painting are of an old stagecoach as the name of the painting suggests. The stagecoach does not have any wheels and so it just sits on the ground.

    Read More

  • Wayside Madonna

    948 Words  | 2 Pages

    The painting is organized simply. The background of the painting is painted in an Impressionist style. The blurring of edges, however, starkly contrasts with the sharp and hard contours of the figure in the foreground. The female figure is very sharp and clear compared to the background. The background paint is thick compared to the thin lines used to paint the figures in the foreground. The thick paint adds to the reduction of detail for the background. The colors used to paint the foreground figures are vibrant, as opposed to the whitened colors of the Impressionist background. The painting is mostly comprised of cool colors but there is a range of dark and light colors. The light colors are predominantly in the background and the darker colors are in the foreground. The vivid color of the robe contrasts with the muted colors of the background, resulting in an emphasis of the robe color. This emphasis leads the viewer's gaze to the focal part of the painting: the figures in the foreground. The female and baby in the foreground take up most of the canvas. The background was not painted as the artist saw it, but rather the impression t...

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Frederic Edwin Church's Twilight In The Wilderness

    754 Words  | 2 Pages

    An artwork will consist of different elements that artists bring together to create different forms of art from paintings, sculptures, movies and more. These elements make up what a viewer sees and to help them understand. In the painting Twilight in the Wilderness created by Frederic Edwin Church in 1860 on page 106, a landscape depicting a sun setting behind rows of mountains is seen. In this painting, Church used specific elements to draw the viewer’s attention directly to the middle of the painting that consisted of the sun. Church primarily uses contrast to attract attention, but it is the different aspects of contrast that he uses that makes the painting come together. In Twilight in the Wilderness, Church uses color, rhythm, and focal

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Promenade Under The Railroad Bridge By Claude Monet

    1281 Words  | 3 Pages

    The first piece of art that really stuck out to me was The Promenade under the Railroad Bridge by Claude Monet. When I first saw it, I felt like the setting was something out of some type of movie. It actually reminded me of a scene from Pride and Prejudice, when Mr. Darcy was walking toward Ms. Elizabeth. The work is an oil painting and was done in 1874. I feel like this made the painting a blurred look and like the day depicted could have been windy from the way the trees and bushes seem to be leaning over to one set side. It caught my attention because it looked like some type of peaceful, relaxing escapade and that the characters in it were having a pleasant encounter.

    Read More

  • The St John River Entering the Atlantic Ocean

    812 Words  | 2 Pages

    “The St. Johns River Entering the Atlantic Ocean” painted by Hermann Herzog stands in American Art as the most ascetically illustrative picture inspired in the Florida coastline. Although, this German American artist settled in Pennsylvania, he painted primarily landscapes inspired in the areas he visited. He traveled and painted throughout Florida, Maine, California and the Northeast side of the country coast.

    Read More

  • Comparative Analysis of Wood's and Wyeth's Paul Revere Artwork

    362 Words  | 1 Pages

    This essay was written to explain the differences between Wood’s painting and N.C. Wyeth’s 1922 illustration. The painting/illustration was inspired from a poem called Paul Revere’s Ride written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The image shows a written scene from the poem that describes Paul Revere’s ride through town as he alarmed the town’s folk. It’s an event that happened during the American Revolution. The comparison between the two images will include discussions about its viewpoints, shadows, scale, and other details that describe the picture.

    Read More

  • Art Formal Analysis

    604 Words  | 2 Pages

    There is a lot of repetition of the vertical lines of the forest in the background of the painting, these vertical lines draw the eye up into the clouds and the sky. These repeated vertical lines contrast harshly with a horizontal line that divides the canvas almost exactly in half. The background, upper portion of the canvas, is quite static and flat, whereas the foreground and middle ground of the painting have quite a lot of depth. This static effect is made up for in the immaculate amount of d...

    Read More

  • The Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel

    1342 Words  | 3 Pages

    The representation of the new age of exploration, which serves as an allusion to man’s potential, is starkly contrasted with the depiction of Icarus that serves as an allegory for man’s limits, indicating the shift from a euro-centric universe. This painting is an oil canvas landscape of the sun setting on the horizon of the ocean sea, while the ships were sailing through the body of water. The focus on humanism during this period is clearly portrayed by the presence of the plowman, shepherd, and fisherman performing their daily task. Lighter colors are used, which differ from the darker colors that were emphasized during the Dark Age or Medieval period. Shadows can be seen on the ground next to the plowman, showing the increasing artistic methods that begin to be utilized.

    Read More

  • Symbolism and Devices in Stephen Crane's The Open Boat

    1931 Words  | 4 Pages

    The story’s theme is related to the reader by the use of color imagery, cynicism, human brotherhood, and the terrible beauty and savagery of nature.  The symbols used to impart this theme to the reader and range from the obvious to the subtle.  The obvious symbols include the time from the sinking to arrival on shore as a voyage of self-discovery, the four survivors in the dinghy as a microcosm of society, the shark as nature’s random destroyer of life, the sky personified as mysterious and unfathomable and the sea as mundane and easily comprehended by humans.  The more subtle symbols include the cigars as representative of the crew and survivors, the oiler as the required sacrifice to nature’s indifference, and the dying legionnaire as an example of how to face death for the correspondent.

    Read More

  • Glisten

    1654 Words  | 4 Pages

    The artist puts a lot of emphasis on color in the painting, and on space and texture of the canvas itself. He does this to bring the viewer into his world and express the emotion he is putting into words with paint. The painting is non-representational and is a part of the Abstract Expressionism movement. The artist particularly involved in the American Abstract Artists group. The concept of Abstract Expressionism was very popular at the time, and this artist was influenced by other Abstract Expressionist artists, such as Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler (University of Kentucky). This painting in particular says a lot about the innovative techniques Gilliam used and why is he world renowned.

    Read More

  • Kawbob's Face Painting

    1337 Words  | 3 Pages

    The horizontal layers were manipulated digitally. This is what makes the piece truly symmetrical. From certain angles the piece may appear asymmetrical. The false illusion of asymmetrically is what gives the piece so much personality. The distribution of weight, or balance, appears to be the same on all sides as the piece is truly symmetrical. The design of the piece is surprisingly modern as it was first drawn by hand; then hand modeled with clay, then manipulated digitally. The artist chose to create on a small scale as each layer was created digitally to compose a whole piece. Some pieces are smaller or wider than others. However, these layers collaboratively compose the final

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Rue Transnonain

    795 Words  | 2 Pages

    The most emphasized part of this image is the man lying on top of the child and leaning against the bed, part of the body being directly in the center and seems to take up the most space, this is where the eye tends to linger. The negative space is made interesting by including a turned over chair, and rumpled sheets on a bed and other homely objects, which indicates that this is set in a home. The contrast that is shown in this artwork is through the use of value since Daumier used implied light, the brighter and darker areas create a contrast against each other. While this piece is not symmetrically balanced, it is balanced asymmetrically. It is asymmetrically balanced through a man and most of a bed being placed in the center, on the right is a small child, the upper torso of an older looking man, a chair next to him, and the rest of the bed; on the left of the man is most of what seems to be a woman, and other less detailed furniture. There is a sense of repetition through the positive shapes of the people lying on the floor, this is also shown through the use of line that creates the entire lithograph. This provides a sense of cohesiveness and unity throughout the

    Read More

  • The Painting

    1128 Words  | 3 Pages

    The painting was of a river flowing from a lake, surrounded by very tall grass. On each side of the river there are people standing. What was interesting is they were painted all black. They looked like shaded figures. They were all shaped differently but you can tell they were all men. On the top left side of the river there were five men. On the right bottom side of the river there were four men. On each side it looked as though the men were trying to cross over to the other side. They looked tired and scared. It looked as though they were hiding, and getting across the river was the only way to get to that safe haven.

    Read More

More about Analysis of Thomas Birch’s painting An American Ship in Distress

Open Document