Art essay

Submitted By Kinard60
Words: 831
Pages: 4

Gecorious KinardJennifer E. TelleriART-101-B03N
05 Oct 2014
An Amazing Art
"A picture can paint a thousand words." I found one picture that to my mind does paint a thousand words and more. It was a couple of weeks ago when I saw this picture in the Chapman Center; the art center is part of South Carolina Upstate College. The beautiful colors caught my eye. I was so enchanted by the painting that I lost the group I was with. When I heard about the observation essay, where we have to write about a person or thing in the city that catches our eye, I knew right away that I wanted to write about the painting by Susanna Floyd Gunter. I don’t know why, but I felt that the painting was describing the way I felt at that moment. The first thing the about painting that catches your eye is its big frame which takes up three fourths of the whole painting. All the sides of the frame have the same length. The color of the main frame is dark brown. The frame is three-dimensional towards the inside. The top side and the left one of the three-dimensional surface towards the inside have a lighter color, common to dark yellow mixed with light brown and highlights of orange. But the color of the other side is bright yellow. There are shades that separate the two colors and distinguish them from each other. That fact discloses that there is a hidden source of light coming from the upper left of the painting. It seems to be a cold windy but sunny day like the beginning of October. The materials of this painting are acrylic and oil on canvas, and it was painted in 2009. It is a simple but at the same time a wonderful painting, meaning its shape is rectangular. Its opposite sides have the same length but the four sides are not equal. The perpendicular sides are longer than the horizontal ones. The texture of the canvas works very well with the subject matter portrayed in the painting. The grassy hill side and the leaves of the trees are especially complimented by the canvas. It makes the leaves feel like they are slightly moving, this combined with the lack of detail itself the leaves. This is contrasted nicely with the very detailed renderings of the trunks and branches of the trees, the conscious decision to put so much effort into the tree itself and then to use obvious brushwork in the leaves makes the trees much more firm and immovable in the landscape. The brushstrokes are very clean and precise on the trees in the background.
Some of the more dominating straight and severe lines appear as the edges of the painting centered above the young woman's head, which extends the vertical element mentioned upwards. The painting itself is divided into three equal sized panels with vertical lines. These forms stress the verticality of the figure and create a strong sense of a vertical axis. Despite her vertical figure, though, her arms also emphasize a strong horizontal axis. One can follow the hand fan she holds in her right hand across her arms and body to the piece of white