絵: Painting
Last Wednesday, Mrs. Tuma told us about some new part
of the Troy curriculum, in which all subjects needed to incorporate writing… or
something like that. To be honest, once we learned that we would need to write in art, we all basically plugged our ears and refused to listen any
longer. Writing should stay in the English classroom, we thought. The next day,
we talked about art in English.
The subject of my first-sixth hour switch was Officer of the Hussars, a painting by
African-American artist Kehinde Wiley, which Ms. Valentino had seen at an
exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and had claimed to be “very
provoking.” We proceeded to spend the next hour attempting to provoke some
discussion from the painting. Needless to say, just like writing in art,
analyzing the visual rhetoric of the painting was a bit awkward (it wasn’t
quite like Maus – that was still
considered literature. This was a different art form altogether).
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| Officer of the Hussars - Kehinde Wiley (2007) |
We were allowed to use our phones to search up the
painting in order to see it in more detail. When I googled Officer of the Hussars, however, the first thing that showed up
wasn’t the photorealistic painting of an African man on a horse. It was this.
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| Officer of the Hussars - Theodore Gericault (1812) |
It’s realistic, I guess. But not entirely. It’s 19th
century realistic; the shadows don’t dig quite as deep, the details aren’t as
articulated, the textures aren’t as naturally random as in real life. But Wiley’s
painting (my artist self quivers in awe at the photorealistic-ness of it) –
that’s skill. There’s just the perfect contrast between the lights and the
darks, the right amount of detail in his veins, and the normal irregularity in
the folds of his clothes. It seems to me as if Wiley cut out a picture and
pasted it over the former Officer of the Hussars.
Wiley borrows a large part of the original painting so
people can identify that he’s fighting a war. But the two Officers of the Hussars are fighting different wars. Wiley's war is definitely more
realistic, more concrete. There’s a larger contrast – a more distinct rift
between the two sides of racism. There’s more detail – more intricacies
resulting from the hundreds of years this conflict has existed for. There’s
more irregularity – more confusion as to the reason of the conflict. It seems
pointless, this hatred of skin color, but the war between acceptance and
rejection exists nonetheless.
"my artist self quivers in awe " same Jenny, same
ReplyDeleteI like how you mentioned how interesting it was for us to be talking about art in english and english in art. These are things you wouldn't really see often. I do praise Wiley's realistic image. As you said, it is nicely shaded and he stands out in the painting too,