The essay that will be discussed are called “Afterglow” by Doug Herr. I found the art piece at the CRC Art gallery. The picture is a landscape with rolling grassy hills which have dried up and became brownish gold. It also has green trees jutting up from the ground with fog flowing around the hills with the sun lighting up the sky from behind a hill. The first time I saw that painting, felt something light up inside of me. It was like a sort of excitement when someone sees something amazing for the first time. Not only is it a beautiful landscape, but it also brings me back to a type of nostalgia.
When I saw it, it brought back memories of when I was a child growing up in Valley Springs. It’s a town in the foothills of Calaveras County where I grew up. In the wet season, the grass would be lush and green with the dew of the falling rain. But in the dry season, the green grass withers and becomes dry and golden. It may not look exactly like how Calaveras County looked like, but it was pretty similar.
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I think it’s because of the rolling hills and that the Altamont looks a little bit like the hills that are displayed in the artwork. The grass also turns a gold color when it dries up during the summer months in that area. I think it is really pretty when it is like that because the hills shine like gold when the sun comes out during the day time. It also makes me think about why California gets its name as the “Golden State”. During the time of the Gold Rush, the immigrants that settled here from China called this place “Gum-Saan”, meaning “Gold Mountain”. And for me, that term sticks with me culturally because my mom is a first generation immigrant from China, born in Macau and raised in Hong Kong. She speaks very good English and has taught me some of her culture and native dialect, which is
The poem begins by exploring how the speaker’s grandfather was a photographer in World War One and how he turned his hobby into his job: “Opened a shop. Turned it into a family affair”. Kay then goes on to introduce the father’s speaker and how he approached photography differently: “His father knew the equipment but not the art. He knew the darks but not the brights, my father learned the magic.” By first introducing the grandfather as a character the reader can better understand the speaker’s father. Since the grandfather took pictures for the war the moments he captured through his lens were much more gruesome, whereas the speaker’s father chooses to stray from this and focus on positivity or as it’s referred to in the poem “light”. Kay then introduces the speaker’s mother, exploring her passion for photography and giving her the title of “artist”. While the grandfather turned photography into his job, the speaker’s father uses photography as a way of capturing noteworthy events, for example: “he travelled across the country to follow a forest fire, hunted it with his camera for a week.” Finally, the speaker’s mother focuses more on the artistry of photography which is seen through her focus on the use of her darkroom. By exploring each of these characters, Kay
Wayne, transforms this painting into a three dimensional abstract piece of art. The focal point of the painting are the figures that look like letters and numbers that are in the front of the piece of art. This is where your eyes expend more time, also sometimes forgiving the background. The way the artist is trying to present this piece is showing happiness, excitement, and dreams. Happiness because he transmits with the bright colours. After probably 15 minutes on front of the painting I can feel that the artist tries to show his happiness, but in serene calm. The excitement that he presents with the letters, numbers and figures is a signal that he feels anxious about what the future is going to bring. Also in the way that the colors in the background are present he is showing that no matter how dark our day can be always will be light to
Claude-Joseph Vernet’s oil on canvas painting titled Mountain Landscape with an Approaching Storm was created in 1775, and it is currently located in the European Art Galleries (18th- 19th Century North) 2nd Floor at the Dallas Museum of Art. It is a large-scale painting with overall dimensions of 64 1/2 x 103 1/4 in. (1 m 63.83 cm x 2 m 62.26 cm) and frame dimensions of 76 1/8 x 115 1/4 x 4 3/4 in. (1 m 93.36 cm x 2 m 92.74 cm x 12.07 cm). Vernet creates this piece by painting elements from nature and using organic shapes in order to create atmospheric effects, weather and different moods. This piece primarily depicts a landscape with a rocky mountainous terrain and villagers scrambling to an upcoming storm.
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.
The first reason, it is remaining me about a photograph Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. They both have a mother sit with her three children and on their face are desperate and struggling to feed their children. The second reason, the artwork gave me a feeling that she is hopeless, depression in her face. She is an impoverished worker woman, exploited by others, and trying her best to support and sustain herself and her children. Section I Description
There is a serene moment when reading John Muir “A Windstorm in the forests,” that rushed through me. Which can only be described as a rush of emotions that one might face when returning home after traveling for so long. I feel that this response is so far harder to write than I could have imagined it to be because the forest Muir is describing within his story, within the Sierra Nevada is one that I grew up with. The same ones that I spent my summers and winter breaks at, I feel a slight struggle when trying to describe my response because I didn’t realize how much I miss all of that and how many of my memories are surrounded by that forest. Reading Muir story brought back the images of seeing stretches of land covered in an endless amount
Somehow I related to this painting at the moment. Looking back in the distance in the sky you see that there was a turbulent time. Saturday was such an awful morning. When backing up you see the bottom of the picture. The lush lively flowers show the bright side happy ending. This was my reminder that there is a calm after the storm just like in the picture.
Robert Frost’s poem Desert Places (1936) begins to stimulate the reader’s visual senses in the first stanza. The poem begins, “Snow falling and night falling fast/ground almost covered in smooth snow,” (Frost, 1936; pg. 654, line 1&2. The sunlight motion suggests a “balance of upward and downward, rising and falling” (Harris, J. 2004), resplendent in nature and indirectly influences the reader spiritually and emotionally. Jane Kenyon’s Let Evening Come (1990), uses sunlight to project an image of a slow moving late afternoon sun, which will soon slip into the darkness of night.
It appears to me that pictures have been over-valued; held up by a blind admiration as ideal things, and almost as standards by which nature is to be judged rather than the reverse; and this false estimate has been sanctioned by the extravagant epithets that have been applied to painters, and "the divine," "the inspired," and so forth. Yet in reality, what are the most sublime productions of the pencil but selections of some of the forms of nature, and copies of a few of her evanescent effects, and this is the result, not of inspiration, but of long and patient study, under the instruction of much good sense…
The French 1884 oil on canvas painting The Song of the Lark by Jules-Adolphe Breton draws grasps a viewer’s attention. It draws an observer in by its intense but subtle subject matter and by the luminous sun in the background. Without the incandescent sun and the thoughtful look of the young woman, it would just be a bland earth-toned farm landscape. However, Breton understood what to add to his painting in order to give it drama that would instantly grab an onlooker’s interest.
Reflections illustrates the emotional pain caused by war through the depiction of a man struggling with the memories of fallen comrades while he experiences the grief of being a surviving soldier and as he also struggles to carry on with life after the war. The subject of the painting is a Vietnam veteran paying tribute to his fallen comrades at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC. As he is standing alone and in silence, he appears to be contemplating his friends that never made it home alive from Vietnam. While gazing at the memorial, he doesn’t appear to be only reading the names, but he actually visualizes the faces of the dead men. The picture insinuates that even though the men were together for only a short amount of time, the recollection of war continues to haunt him regularly.
As I read this work of art, my mind was transported to my favorite place in the outdoors. My imagination was filled with the waving of the tall grass, the stillness of the trees, and the feeling that time is standing still and I’m the only one who notices. For example, it sparked the idea, or memory, of how much I love nature and the outdoors, and the great sense of peace it brings to me. In an instant, it showed me how far I had drifted from that mindset.
What do you feel when you see a sunset? Warm, happy, amazed, awe-inspired? The sun rose yesterday, and will again tomorrow, and will again the day after that, it’s not as if the sunrise is a miraculous event, yet the emotions are visceral. It’s beautiful, and this strikes a deep, primal chord inside. John Berger attempts to unravel this mysterious attraction to beauty in his essay, “The White Bird”. The white bird in question is a small, wooden carving of a white bird, hung in the kitchens of certain cultures that experience long winters, such as the Haute Savoie region in France. According to Berger, the birds are an attempt to hold onto the fleeting beauty of nature, and a reminder of the spring to come. “Nature is energy and struggle. It
The speaker used the literary element of imagery to create a representation in the reader’s mind, " The colors within this frame are darker than autumn, darker even than winter-the browns of earth, though earth's most radiant elements burn through the canvas." ( Pastan 19-23) This sentences described that the painting was not just a simple drawing in the museum; it had vivid colors. Besides, it was something alive and connected to earth which was also necessary to care and save by children.
"A picture can paint a thousand words." I found the one picture in my mind that does paint a thousand words and more. It was a couple of weeks ago when I saw this picture in the writing center; the writing center is part of State College. The beautiful colors caught my eye. I was so enchanted by the painting, I lost the group I was with. When I heard about the observation essay, where we have to write about a person or thing in the city that catches your eye. I knew right away that I wanted to write about the painting. I don’t know why, but I felt that the painting was describing the way I felt at that moment.