Un Coq Pour Chango: The Oracle And The Green Bird

The art work by the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) titled Un coq pour Chango ( A Rooster for Shango) or The Oracle and the Green Bird was created in 1947. This piece represents freedom of art and human beings’ relation, connection to the nature, in particularly animals. I think the art work depicts 2 hybrid figures; audience can grasp from the title that one of them represents a human and another one represents a bird. Present location of the painting is The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and it’s original location is The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The painting is oil on burlap, it is presented hanging on the wall. I believe that the purpose of this art piece is to portray Afro-Cuban imagery and show the kinship between humans and nature. The painting is medium size, it is 42 in. x 35 in. In spite of the fact that the painting is 68 years old, it is in a pretty good condition: it barely has any scratches or cracks, fissures. The colors look faded. However, it might have been the intentional part of the concept.

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