Although at first glimpse the background appears to be pitch black, recent analysis indicates that Vermeer had painted a translucent layer of green which has faded over time, over the dark under-painting, to create a lustrous tone that sharply contrasts the warm skin tone of the Girl, amplifying the light tone in the object, thus producing a much more three-dimensional optical effect of the object. This technique provokes a series of thoughts in the viewer: why does Vermeer want us to see only the Girl? What significance does this Girl hold in his life? One can appreciate the smooth texture of the Girl’s facial features, the radiance in her eyes and her lovely vermilion lips. An intriguing detail would be the absence of the line that defines the profile of the left hand side of her nose, which suggests that Vermeer might have painted the portrait with the help of a camera obscura that tends to alleviate the tonal range of the image, causing the lines to disappear.
30 August 2014. In “Girl Before a Mirror,” Pablo Picasso uses cubism and contrasting colors to create a pessimistic tone to illustrate the duality of the woman’s nature. The painter uses simple shapes and lines to create the body of the woman, but he remains successful at displaying her both in side profile and frontally as she peers into a mirror that reflects a woman she is not. In reality, she is a beautiful pregnant woman with perky, round breasts and small eyes. As she stares at her reflection, she sees herself as an old woman, whose young body has been distorted and gravity has taken its rightful place, creating a self pity attitude.
This essay is on the painting “Girl Arranging Her Hair”, painted by Mary Cassat in 1886. The media is oil on canvas. This painting now hangs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Line is an important formal element of artwork because line is essential in a painting to depicting objects and symbols and to define shapes. The line in this piece of art draws your eyes to the top right side of the painting and gradually brings your eyes down the painting focusing attention on the girl. Forcing attention on the girl caught in the act of arranging her hair allows the person looking at the painting to become that girl and to imagine what she is thinking at that personal moment.
It helps by making the most important part of the picture stand out to the viewers and capturing their attention. There are three main paintings done by Degas, Renoir, and Monet—a few of the painters that helped build up Impressionism to a point of prominence—that contain all of these characteristics. In Edgar Degas’ painting, Prima Ballerina, the most important part of it is the ballerina. Degas was able to make this quite obvious by blurring and distorting the people and scenery behind her. Degas also used very light pastel colors in the background to make the ballerina stand out more in the painting, as well as making her seem like she is letting off light and making the work seem, in general, much more relaxing and carefree.
She writes, “She laid her hands on me,/then washed out my mouth/with Ivory soap. This/was to purify, she said,/and cleanse your lying tongue.” These few lines make me think that she’s trying to describe white as the right thing. She does this again in the second stanza when she says, “I could act like my homemade dresses come straight out of the window at Maison Blanche.” This phrase makes us think that dresses from the “White House” are better than others. I think the overall message of this little girl is that she used to think that white was better. Clothes were
La Tour used a painting technique called, trompe l’oeil, French terminology for, “fool the eye.” La Tour obviously used this technique before William Harnett came along. This particular technique gives the painting a very unusual appearance where some of the objects look like they are glued onto the canvas. There are a lot of details and depth in this painting. The women’s hats with the feathers, the jewelry, the wine bottle, coins on the table, the cards behind the tricksters back just to name a few. La Tour carefully and artistically arranged the subjects in a way that the texture causes the viewer to develop an impulse to touch the piece.
The artist works from the beginning to the end of each piece, with the intent that each paintings theme can be interpreted subjectively. She typically paints upon treated wooden panels, incorporating the grain of the wood into the painting. She uses graphite pencil, acrylic paint and sometimes watercolour. Her style integrates both narrative and figurative styles with the mystic. Her works are characterised by young attractive women in dream-like settings with large, fanciful creatures.
. around us.” Thus, as listing themselves being similar to a doctor, stylists’ are legitimizing that their work is not entirely easy, and there is a science to it. But they are also proclaiming that an African American woman has “sick hair” because it is not the same texture as the average White woman’s. Hair stylists have a number of different stances that they associate themselves with, which provides vivid testaments in regards to their type of work. They learn how to be a hair expert through a large number of hair shows, attending cosmetology school, and by attending continuing education courses.
Cassatt would send paintings back to the United States to be exhibited and her works were some of the first impressionists paintings seen in the US. Mary Cassatt remained in France and helped teach others who were interested in the art of Impressionism. She developed diabetes which took her vision from her slowly. She later suffered from ill health and was totally blind at her death in France on June 4th, 1926. I chose to write about Mary Cassatt’s works of art because I like the balance and colors in her paintings.
In the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", the author, Charlotte Perkins, does an excellent job of painting a picture of the main character. She is a young woman who seemingly appears to be suffering from postpartum depression. Her illness gives her intuition into her and other female's situation in marriage and in society, even as the treatment she undergoes cheats her of her sanity. This is a reality in today's world and this character is easy to relate