The piece of art I have chosen for this blog post is one I found on The Metropolitan Museum of Art webpage entitled "Still Life with Checked Tablecloth" by Juan Gris. The first visual element I would like to call attention to in this piece are the shapes. This painting uses a variety of cube like shapes to form images of every day items. These items are manipulated into these strange shapes by the artist and make still life unrealistic but unique.
Another visual element in this piece is the artists use of space. The dominant objects, or the positive space, are the objects in the middle of the painting placed on the table. The negative space is the table and the area around it. Clearly the artists wants attention drawn to the objects on the table and not to the area surrounding it.
Color is also an important element in this piece. The artists uses a wide variety of distinct, bright colors to make this painting stand out. There are parts of the painting that use a lot of monochromatic colors and then areas that use complementary colors to distinguish differences in the objects that the artists has rendered.
The reason I chose this painting was because I was searching for paintings in the style of cubism because I thought I would be able to find clear examples of visual elements in them. This is the first painting that stuck out for me. The way the shapes are formed on this painting make give it a chaotic feel for me, like the artists began drawing and decided he would paint things in any manner that he found appealing. The colors he uses are bright and friendly, it gives the painting a pleasant feel that I enjoy very much.
Very wise to chose a cubist piece Charles, especially when writing about the visual elements. You do very good work observing how they are being used in this work. Going forward, see if you can be even more descriptive in your writing- for example, when you say the artist uses complementary colors (you are right) it would be even better writing if you expanded that thought and said which complementary colors and where they are being used.
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