Van Gogh's Bedroom At Arles

The paintings of Van Gogh and Jacques-Louis David are two art works that at first glance seems very different. For instance, they have dissimilar content, but they do use the same elements. Therefore, they contain some similarities. Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles looks straightforward and natural. It is a modest portrayal of a scene that we see every day. It vividly displays variation in colors through the objects, as well as other elements like directional lines and implied depth. The perspective in this artwork is warped. In other words, the room is displayed in an unusual viewpoint. The viewers can see the bottom board of the bed and the chair on the left side that’s blocking a door. This implies that the painting is more complex that it seems.

Artists typically utilize the other elements of art aforementioned to put emphasis on a particular part of the painting. Van Gogh uses size and the variations in color to accomplished this. For instance, we see that the bed is so much bigger because of the way it’s positioned with the big bottom board accentuated. We can also see this in the blue color of the wall, which emphasizes the different objects hanging, such as the frames and the towel. In the same manner, the colors in the second painting gives emphasis to the meaningful parts of the artwork. The red cape clearly indicates that the man in the middle is important in this painting. In fact, he is the focal point of the artwork. Focal point is another element that coincides with emphasis. It is defined as the main focus or the center of the artwork. The man looks like he’s protecting the women and children by fighting the men. He’s doing this by standing in front of the women and children, as he gathered all the men’s swords. The focal point of the first painting is not as clear as the second one. The bed is emphasized as I mentioned and all the directional lines leads to it, so it is possibly the focal point. The whole artwork captures an unusual perspective of a bedroom. The bed is essentially the center of this distortion because of the way that it is painted. We can then conclude from this main idea that the bed is indeed the focal point. This kind of initiates the question of why the room is painted this way and what the message could be from the