Mile 1555 - Portland Art Museum: Part 2, OR

While I was in the Museum I took some notes on my observations of a few paintings that grabbed my attention. These notes are mostly about methods that the artist used to achieve depth; there is no details included about the history of the painting or the artist. Here's a few observations on three paintings I spent some time with:

Boats Returning Home, William Ritschel, 1864-1949
A California Impressionist

The paint texture gives a sense of depth; large unarticulated daubs of paint dominate the foreground and gradually the strokes are smaller and more defined while the distant horizon is smoothed out.

Vibrancy of the color is also used to achieve depth: the water in the  foreground has a complex range of colors of contrasting yellow and violet mixed in with touches of vibrant red.  The foremost ship has a faint touch of red which a connects with a muted red in the sea in the focal point.

Focal point of the painting is the fifth ship from the foreground, this ship has the sharpest contrast  lines, features the most distinct warm/cool contrast, and includes touches of every color found on the painting.

Background is very low-contrast and low-vibrancy. Flat grey strokes imply ships so far that they eye can barely see them.

Various colored unarticulated daubs in the foreground give the impression of the depth of the water as well as the difficulty to focus on your bottom field of vision. 

Gabriel Revel 1686

Depth is achieved through masterful use of perspective lines in the architecture of the building as well as in the background.

Focal point is achieved by use of vibrant colors; main foreground characters wear primary red, blue, and yellow, while side characters wear muted secondary violet, green, and orange.

Main casts down on woman and blue with a little extending to man in red sash.

One of the characters faces is partially translucent; very peculiar. Is this a sign of it being added later to balance the focus more towards the man in the painting? Without this figure he would be cut off from the main party and the painting as a whole would be unbalanced. However, depending on the paint, it could have just been difficult to paint that figure over that column without giving him too much of a focus. Interesting to think about.

What's especially interesting is that if you simply look at the architecture of the building, the artist was trying to place these figures in a very large space, but he has a number of factors that flatten out the painting. The figures that you can see through the column are so small that you can see he was really trying to convey an immense depth.
        The light in the foreground also gives a nice sense of depth in the foreground, but the background has it's own lighting that is equivalent in tone and even saturation, which makes the mountains feel feet away.
        The foreground characters are pretty much all there is to look at in this painting except for maybe a quick glance to the random guy on the far right, so even though there's perspective lines, your eye just gets stuck on the figures in the foreground.
        Lastly, there really isn't much foreground. The people are right there at the bottom of your field of vision

Water Lilies, Claude Monet, 1914
A French Impressionist

Foreground is painted with circular strokes and reflection is painted with vertical strokes

There is a definite sense of depth though there is no horizon line.

Depth is achieved by complex range of colors, background at the top of the painting is all cool colors and family of color gets progressively more complex towards the foreground at the bottom of the painting.

Swirls of green and blue give an impression of lily pond leaves stacked on eachother and partially covered with water reflecting the branches of the tree above.

What I think is remarkable about this painting is that the blue lilies are the focal point of the painting. Almost the entire painting is saturated with cool colors except for the five bright pink lilies at the bottom. You would think they would stand out more and yet the uncontrasting blue lilies hold your focus. It should be noted that the blue lilies are slightly bigger in size. It's as if he wanted the focus of the painting to be the blue lilies, but he knew that if the lilies were just blue, they wouldn't become a focus. Adding the pink lilies places a focus on all of the lilies and since the blue ones are a little larger and span the entire painting, they become the focus. 

Mile 1555 - Portland Art Museum: Part 1, OR

With Sarah having ice cream girl time with Sharon, I snuck in a few solo hours at the Portland Art Museum. There was alot to see and only four hours to see it, so you have to be intentional about how you go through the museum. So what do you do when you go through an art gallery? Take an audio tour through every room? Find the most famous names and check them off your list? Art Museums can be daunting.

My strategy for the day is to go into a section of the gallery, briefly walk around the whole room, and then spend at least ten minutes with a single painting. What ended up happening is I spent 10 minutes in a room deciding which painting I want to look at, and then I spent twenty minutes staring at one and jotting down notes. 

How do I choose you ask? 

I once read something profound about the impact that an artwork can have on a person. Art is created because language cannot describe everything that can be found in the human soul. Our feelings and thoughts are not limited to the words that have been made to define them. We are not shallow beings and words are only one way of expressing our experience of being, which is why so many people have chosen alternative ways to express themselves.

Joy can be made with a guitar, grief can be told with a color, need can be carved, revolution can be written into symphony, feelings can live in a ring; and when someone finds a way to bring to life a piece of themselves, it brings to life an experience shared by someone else that they never thought about before. 

How many of us fully understand our grief, our anger, or so many emotions that we live with everyday? We all have more to learn about who we are.

So in a way, I let the paintings choose me. I walk around and trust that in all of history, there were a few artists who have felt what I have felt or who have put on a canvas something that reaches something deep in my soul.

This has happened enough times to know it's worth looking, but no, there's no guarantee. Sometimes you quickly understand, but often you have to spend time with a painting that strikes you. I think it can be because you're trying to understand the artist's motivation, maybe the historic significance; but sometimes being vulnerable about your own life experience reveals what's behind the artist's intentions, or it could reveal something else.

There's one painting of my sister's that I have stared at for a significant amount of minutes. There's nothing about it that immediately jumps out at you, but it has always struck me. I don't know why she painted it, and if she told me, I think it would lessen it's impact. I can't tell you what it means, but looking into it, new thoughts have awoken about the complexity of life. I don't really want to say much more, because these thoughts are very personal to me, but I love those thoughts, and I hope for you that art could slow you down and awake the mysteries in you.

So you didn't really get a tour of the Portland Art Museum, but it was really great, so next up I'm going to post some notes I wrote on a few of the pieces I spent some time with next.

Rad Trip Map

Here it is! The Radtrip has begun!
The one thing everyone wants to know is "WHERE ARE YOU GUYS GOING?"

We really want to plan as we go, so we still don't have a good answer. Instead of choosing a route, we have saved every location that we have heard of on a google map and we'll plan our weeks from there. Check out what we have thus far, and let us know if we're missing a must-see. Thanks for following our trip!

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