ARTS 150: Approaches – Final Paper. The woman behind Screen Door
ARTS 150: Approaches – Final Paper
The final paper will consist of five (5) double-spaced pages. As in other assignments, you will choose one (1) artwork from the Allen Memorial Art Museum to discuss at length. The final paper will consist of both Formal Analysis and Interpretive Analysis methods, which will be combined into a single piece of writing.
You should choose an artwork from the Modern or Contemporary period (i.e., an artwork made after 1900). Spend time with the artwork, looking at it in detail, in person, over several visits. Using language of formal analysis, as learned in lecture and in previous papers, analyze your artwork’s composition, medium, technique, and style. Identify which art movement(s) the work represents and discuss the artist’s unique interpretation of that aesthetic. How does the work clearly embody that movement – what does it do differently?
You should then also consider the artwork’s textual, symbolic, and interpretive content. What are the underlying themes of the work? What social context is surrounding the artwork? Does it convey specific ideas, feelings, meanings, etc.? If the work is abstract, what are its underlying artistic and/or cultural concepts? (Remember: even if a work is abstract, it will still be connected to some sort of idea or concept, though it may not convey that idea representationally.) You should also spent at least one page discussing how your interpretive analysis is informed by the formal analysis: ideas are perceived through form, so how does your artwork support this transaction? (In other words, how does your artwork use its composition to convey an idea?)
The woman behind Screen Door
Name
Institutional Affiliation
The "Woman behind Screen Door, Independence, California" is an artwork created by Ansel Adams, an American in 1944. It is a contemporary artwork produced after the Great Depression that occurred in 1929 and ended in the late 1930s. The piece of art is currently found at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, and it is 38.1x49.5 cm in size. Adams created the art using gelatin silver print often used on paper to produce images. Adam's works involved black and white colors in his imaging, often portraying the American West. He was a phenomenal individual who was both an environmentalist and a landscape photographer, often advocating for pure photography. Thus, his artwork was more of photography than drawing, painting, and sketching. As a conservationist, his works played a significant role in urging the public to conserve the wildered areas. His technique facilitated the development of photography in the fine arts field. In "Woman behind Closed Door," Adam uses light medium and high contrast to emphasize significant areas such as the woman's face while evoking reaction among the audience concerning the subject's state of wellbeing.
Formal Analysis
In the artwork, the woman is placed at the center of the piece, obtaining the audience's entire focus. The background is black with nothing in its space. The woman's face reveals a tired or somewhat fragile individual considering that her face is wrinkled. The artist uses thin lines on her forehead while her eye bags are saggy, exposing her skin's bold lines. The lady's polka-dotted blouse creates a difference in the woman's face, background, and clothing. On her ring finger, the lady has a golden ring as she leans on a wooden board. Because the piece is a photograph, the artist used gelatin silver print to focus light on her body's visible parts while keeping her clothing and the background dark, meaning that the latter is of less importance. This technique uses paper to create monochromatic images based on the sensitivity of light in the silver. When it was placed on light, the silver is more sensitive on the less dark parts, creating the woman's contrasted image. This was a highly technologized innovation that contemporary times have implemented to produce quality pictures with precise focusing and sharpness.
Art Movements
The artwork represents the Impressionism art movement of the 19th Century. This is a movement associated with mostly French artists who made efforts to accurately record visual impressions by emphasizing the changing qualities of light. Modern photography is based on this fact because they seek to enhance the picture's quality by emphasizing light sensitivity, a significant property of light useful in arts. Impressionism can be characterized by thin yet visible strokes while emphasizing the depiction of light to produce the pictures' unusually visual angles. From the art, the woman's face and condition allow the audience to create an opinion based on her looks, which is a similar idea in impressionism, which sought to enable people to form their opinions and mental pictures of the artwork produced using its techniques. Since the painting is a contemporary piece of art, it reflected on the political issues and the community's societal aspects, including the position of women in the political sphere. Adam's art shows a woman behind a screen door, meaning that she can see what is happening, yet she has no control because there is a barrier between her position and the outside world. This means that she is tired of the things she has encountered, yet there is no control. The artist has focused more light on her face, and although she seems sad and frustrated, she eventually obtained attention from the outer region. The background color illustrates the inadequate clarity before the woman in the picture, who app...