“Women of Tahiti” is a famous artwork of a French artist Paul Gauguin; Paul Gauguin painted this picture in 1891 in Tahiti. Gauguin loved travelling and one of his favorite places was a French colony island –Tahiti. He loved Tahiti and stayed there for years, discovering the culture of this island. In his artwork “women of Tahiti”, I see two women sitting on the beach. My first impression is fulfilled with warm sunny colors, light ocean breeze and warm sand. The picture is taking the viewer to the exotic island of Tahiti One of the women, facing the viewer, was Gauguin’s mistress and the woman facing down was her sister. By looking at the picture, I feel a strong contrast between these two women. This contrast seemingly reflects in the clothes they are wearing in the facial expressions also in the traditional elements, which indicate about the status of these women. …show more content…
She is facing down and her face looks sad. She is wearing a traditional Tahiti poreo – red skirt with white flower prints, wrapped around her waist and a light blue top. She is having a white flower behind her ear and a light colored ribbon on her hair. This flower could be quite symbolic, telling that she might be single and ready for marriage. Paul Gauguin belonged to a symbolist art movement of early 1900s, and loved giving the viewer some sort of sigma, that always by looking at his art, the viewer wants to discover, what the artist wants to tell. I am also seeing some disproportions on her body. Her right hand and foot look a bit distorted and disproportional. This also was in style of Paul Gauguin to exaggerate people’s bodies on his artworks. Gauguin used very natural colors in women’s skin tones. The colors are blending nicely giving an effect of
When that room is entered all voices are hushed, and all merriment silenced. The place is as holy as a church. In the centre of the canvas is the Virgin Mother with a young, almost girlish face or surpassing loveliness. In her eyes affection and wonder are blended, and the features and the figure are the most spiritual and beautiful in the world's art.
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...
The painting depicts a mother and her four children, who are all leaning on her as she looks down solemnly, her tired, despondent expression suggests she felt trapped in her roles as being a mother and a wife. The woman and her children are clearly the focal point of the artwork as the bright colours used to paint them stand out impeccably against the dull, lifeless colours of the background. This painting appears to be centred around the ideology that women are home-keepers, whose main role is to satisfy and assist her husband while simultaneously minding the children and keeping the home tidy and ready for his return. The social consequences of this artwork could have been that the woman could have been berated for not taking pleasure out of being a mother and raising her children, as a woman should. She could have been made redundant as her husband may have felt as though she is no longer useful if she couldn’t adequately adhere to her roles as a mother and a
Aristotle once claimed that, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” Artists, such as Louise-Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun and Mary Cassatt, captured not only the way things physically appeared on the outside, but also the emotions that were transpiring on the inside. A part no always visible to the viewer. While both artists, Le Brun and Cassatt, worked within the perimeters of their artistic cultures --the 18th century in which female artists were excluded and the 19th century, in which women were artistically limited-- they were able to capture the loving relationship between mother and child, but in works such as Marie Antoinette and Her Children and Mother Nursing her Child 1898,
A full face mask decorated exists to validate the progress made by all three women while also representing the creative component of this project. It adds to women’s literature by marking said progress. There is a clear visual of where they started at the beginning, where they were in the middle, and then where they stood at the finish line. The left side which is pink goes to show the messier side of these women’s lives. Negative words were placed on this side because they acted as a response to how they were treated on a daily basis. One word that respectively represents Queen Elizabeth in this instance is emotion. For example, line one proclaims, “I grieve and dare not show my discontent (page 67).” Queen Elizabeth seemed to have all these emotions but did not quite understand how to best express them. Whereas, the right side of the mask is meant to look more beautiful than the left. To articulate the beauty of the right side, positive words were typed out and then placed onto the mask. Some of the words included in this section are power, strength, etc. In particular, power is placed in the middle to represent both sides. It can be negative in a way because the women seemed to lack it in the beginning of their pieces. On the other hand, power is also positive because it was something they acquired. With this in mind, the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper
... study for the overall concept they appear rather as abstract patterns. The shadows of the figures were very carefully modeled. The light- dark contrasts of the shadows make them seem actually real. The spatial quality is only established through the relations between the sizes of the objects. The painting is not based on a geometrical, box like space. The perspective centre is on the right, despite the fact that the composition is laid in rows parallel to the picture frame. At the same time a paradoxical foreshortening from right to left is evident. The girl fishing with the orange dress and her mother are on the same level, that is, actually at equal distance. In its spatial contruction, the painting is also a successful construction, the groups of people sitting in the shade, and who should really be seen from above, are all shown directly from the side. The ideal eye level would actually be on different horizontal lines; first at head height of the standing figures, then of those seated. Seurats methods of combing observations which he collected over two years, corresponds, in its self invented techniques, to a modern lifelike painting rather than an academic history painting.
Certain parts of her body are heavily exaggerated; she has overly huge breast, her stomach is large and as well as her butt. She appears to be smooth and her parts of her body I would consider to be very symmetrical. The artist that created her has chosen to exaggerate her breast and make them appear large and full. As well as they have done with her stomach, by making it appear overly large and to symbolize fertility or a late stage of pregnancy for women. The artist carriers, this plumpness and roundness of the female figure throughout out the stature. The artist has demonstrated plumpness of the female figure through her legs and carries it to her back side as well. The one aspect of this figure the artist had heavily rendered in detail, is the figures female genitalia. The genitalia is heavily rendered to show a female reproductive organs. It’s this aspect of the sculptural nature that makes me think that the artist had created her for fertility reasons.
The gestural and heavy working of the paint and the contrasting colors make the painting appear active yet are arduous to follow. The defining element of Woman and Bicycle is the presence of the black lines that do most of the work in terms of identifying the figure. Through the wild nature of the brushwork, color, and composition of the painting, it can be implied that the artist is making an implication towards the wild nature of even the most proper of women.
The Tahitian island of Hiva Oa is the place where artist Paul Gauguin chose to live out the remaining years of his life. In The Moon and Sixpence, the narrator describes the place by saying, “the beauty of the island is unveiled as diminishing distance shows you in distincter shape its lovely peaks…for Tahiti is smiling and friendly” (Maugham 160). This is an excellent description of the island, and it is little wonder that Gauguin found solace here. Hiva Oa is on the southern coast of Tahiti and is the most fertile and well known of the Marquisas group of islands, of which there are six. Even today, Hiva Oa retains much of the physical beauty that it did during Gauguin’s stay. Many of the roads are unpaved and the largest tikis in Polynesia are found right on the island. On the cliffs overlooking the village of Atuona is Cavalry Cemetery where Gauguin is buried, along with another famous man, Belgian singer Jacques Brel, who also lived out his life in Hiva Oa. In the village is a museum dedicated to the artist’s life and works. Further to the east is Puamau Village, where many of Gauguin’s descendants still live, mostly in the native lifestyle. In The Moon and Sixpence the natives are described as being promiscuous, although the definition may have a different meaning to Westerners than it does to the natives. One of the narrator’s friends describes the artist’s wife as “a good girl and she’s only seventeen.
The painting, in its simplest form, consists of a naked woman lying elegantly upon stately and rich cloths, while a young, also nude boy, is holding a mirror which contains her reflection. Upon first glance of this work, I was quickly able to make out the identity of the two subjects. ...
Fauve style painting is defined as using color and letting it stand on its own, drawing strong and unified perspective to each element on the canvas. It also valued individual expression. (theartstory.org/movement-fauvism, n.d.). In the essay by Beth Harris and Steve Zucker, Bonheur de Vivre, they discuss the vibrant scenery’s colors and moving nudes within the painting, and liken it as the closest to Cézanne’s The Large Bathers.
The painting depicts two figures, the one of a woman and of a man. The dominating central figure is the one of the woman. We see her profile as she looks to the left. Her hands are crossed in a graceful manner. She has blonde hair and her figure is lit by what seems to be natur...
In her interpretation of the painting she informs the reader that the two women in the picture are in fact the same woman. In the painting it is the woman on the left is before marriage and the woman on the right is as a wife. In this interpretation Goffen has shown that Titian doesn't always show women as just objects. " For Titian, humanity (male as well as female) was defined by sexuality, not merely by gender, and human sexuality was interpreted as a potent, positive quality ventral to the individual's identity and a concomitant of her (or his) personality" (112). Titian showed more understanding of women in his paintings but still believed they needed to do their role of being there for their husbands with what they need and for raising the children.
Rossetti shows us the woman being painted as many different things. Although she is just a painting, the woman symbolizes how the artist views women in real life: as objects. Irony is used when the woman is painted as “a queen”(5). She is put on a pedestal in a position of power, yet she is only described as being “in [an] opal or ruby dress”(5), cementing her role as an ornament. The ruby symbolizes passion and perhaps promiscuity. Opal is a white stone that reflects many colors. White symbolizes purity; while the different colors reflected symbolize how her meaning can change, and how the artist controls her identity and can make her fit any persona he desires. The woman is also depicted as a “nameless girl”(6), indicating her identity is not important to the artist. It also shows that he does not personally know the women he’s painting, but only their looks, affirming that he bases their value off of their appearances. Lastly, the artist portrays a woman as “a saint [and] an angel”(7) and compares her to the “moon”(11), an allusion to Artemis, the goddess of virginity. In this painting, she is established as a pure virgin, which was a requirement of the time period Rossetti lived in. However, because it is one of the fantasies the artist creates, and the poem antagonizes him, this line also expresses the idea that a woman’s purity should not define her. He makes the innocent virgin and the licentious queen the only ways women can be viewed. Yet, they are the same to him. Lacking depth, their physical description is the only thing giving them any meaning. Rossetti describing the portraits conveys the idea that no matter the position in society; or what their actual personalities are like, women are just blank canvases for men to project their fantasies onto. Uninterested in a real person, the artist worships the idea of a
If everything was brightly colored, one might view this as a happy painting, and interpret the woman as self-confident and problem free. The lighting and contrasts in color and lighting open the viewer’s interpretation to the possibility that this is not just a normal portrait of a woman non-chalantly admiring herself, that this woman may be in