Paintings Report

 

During the class of English for specific purposes, we were shown different paintings from several well-known authors around the world. Before taking a look at all the paintings I just chose three of them which were the ones I felt more attracted to.

Afterwards, I started researching about each of them just for getting to know the most important features which made special those sorts of paintings and the reason why the authors became really famous among a lot of artists in certain periods of time.

For instance, I had chosen the painting named the bedroom at Arles by Vicent Van Gogh. As the name establishes, this is a painting in which the author shows his own bedroom while he was waiting for one of his friends in Arles. In my point of view, the use of colors is a little bit exaggerated. However, the most important characteristics is the way in which Van Gogh expresses his mood through colors as the brownish floor in the picture. At the same time, the objects in the paintings play an important role which represents Van Gogh’s desire for companionship and friendship reflected by two pitchers, two chairs, two pillows and two pictures in the same painting.

In all of his paintings Van Gogh expresses all his feelings and his perspective on the world, using colors that in real world are kind of weird. Though, there were other artists who were worried about expressing just a certain moment which was an important part of life as impressionism concerns. The Boatman Lunch by Renoir is a clear example where the author is showing just a particular moment in which his friends are relaxing on a balcony in a river in France. All the elements involved the audience the minimal plates and cups in the painting that are completely painted with all detail. In this picture, it is not more valuable the people’s faces than the bottles or the grapes on the table. Everything is well-made with all its details and peculiar characteristics as a whole because it is part of this exact moment. In this particular way of paintings, painters were focused on expressing whatever situation or thing in a particular moment. In other words, they were aware of using light to say that whatever thing was different in certain hours of the day. For instance, if the painting mentioned had been created two hours later, it would have been as a result another one because light made see and look things different.

Nevertheless, paintings as The Gleaners by Millet show a scene about real world and nature. Specially, Millet’s works dealt with expressing aspects which depicted the real situations at the moment. This was the most important feature that realism concerned about. In the painting it is highlighted the job of three women picking the remains up the harvest. Millet is showing the tiredness that those women have due to the labour they are doing. For this reason, this kind of paintings are well-known for dealing with real situation in the world but pointing out the labour of poor people instead of regarding aspects about high society.

Having known about those paintings made me think that all of them were made to express then author’s point of view and perspective about the world. Even though, they are using certain feature according to the tendency they were focused on. For instance, Van Gogh was worried about the use of colors to express his feelings more than specific moments as impressionism did. To Van Gogh it was more important to show through out his paintings the way he saw everything, maybe a person or a room in its inside than trying to make a copy of a photograph as impressionism wanted to reach. It is difficult for me to identify tendencies that have been really important through time; however, it is a window to know a little bit about certain periods of time and what an artist wanted to show with their paintings. I might not know very much about art but I like all the features that characterized every painting, specially the ones I have mentioned in this report.