The art world today, inundated with pretentious dilettantes struggling
to make an effort to appear lofty and classy before society, sometimes
forgets one of the most important concepts of creating art itself.
That is to say, the concept of creating art for the sake of releasing
emotion or sending a message sometimes becomes lost in an illusion
that people are constantly competing. What one must keep in mind is,
is that some birth creations, not in an effort to gain the fame and
honor of becoming the next Da Vinci or van Gogh, but instead to create
canvases splattered upon with their own emotion—the original idea of
art, per se. People spend too much time focusing on and praising the
old, that they do not realize how much beauty that the new art can
hold With this in mind, the two images, Rain Spell and Umbrella
Liability Protection, were selected not only because of their linking
similarity that lies behind the theme of “umbrellas,” but also because
they are both relatively unknown pieces.
Despite the fact that the two images hold the same theme, however,
they managed to be quite different from one another. An unknown artist
created Rain Spell and portrayed his work on a fantasy artwork gallery
on the Internet. At a first glance, one could notice the bizarre,
surreal aspects of the painting that notably jump out at one’s eyes.
The painting within the painting reaches out—the water of the ocean in
the landscape behind the female stretches forward, away from the
boundaries of the frame, stretching out as the hand of a curious
infant would stretch. To add to the strange nature of the creation,
the girl, standing centered in her environment, manages to balance an
umbrella perfectly perpendicular to the ground while her hand leaks
with droplets of water. Her face fails to hint at any note of
perplexity; everything to her is not of the unordinary. Rain Spell’s
artist deserves praise for the incorporation of these elements that
break the natural laws of the “normal world,” for it succeeds in
seeding the question that image was meant to embed into the observer’s
brain. “What is going on?” the observer of the painting asks himself.
A criticism on the composition of the water, however, does exist. The
water that reaches out of the depths of the landscape behind the
female appears to be awkward. The artist’s attempt seemed as if he was
trying to overlap two worlds together, though with the angling of the
water reaching out, it appears as if a third world was added. Instead,
the water stretching away form the background landscape should be
composed as a falling gush of waterfall in order to bridge the two
worlds together effectively without awkwardness. Still, the painting
does contain an array of redeeming qualities. The artist of Rain Spell
is a master of repetition, in colour as well as in shapes. Three basic
colours are found in this piece: red, blue, and white (including
off-white). The red on the tiles, wall, and in the girl’s clothing
reciprocate  the red found on the flaps of the umbrella. Blues from
the oceanic landscape’s water and sky tie in with the wall of the
world in which the girl stands. White reciprocates in the girl’s skin,
umbrella, bubbling tops of the water, lines of the floor, and finally,
the paper boat placed off-centre to the right. Red and blue are
compositionally placed together to make the colors bold. They are not
next to each other on the color wheel , nor are they complementary
colors, thus in turn they seem to stick out noticeably from each
other—almost as if the colors represent the two worlds that exist in
the piece. The reciprocation weaves the subjects of the painting
together tightly. The repeated patterns of the droplets falling from
the girl’s left hand cleverly repeat its shape in the wallpaper, all
the more adding in artistic elements that help tie in the two worlds
of the painting together. Again, repetition is seen with the
horizontal lines of the girl’s stockings and in the vertical lines of
the wall standing behind her. The tone emitting from the painting is
an overall calm—nothing strange and out of the ordinary. The bizarre
breaking of the laws of nature in the painting sitting adjacently to
the calm, composed girl contrast each other to effectively create a
surreal piece that causes the observer to ponder upon why the female
is oblivious to the strange happenings. The piece shows that overall
people wish to find explanations for the peculiar. When people look at
something that they do not understand, it irks them—bothers them to
near insanity until they are forced to find the answer to the “why”
lurking in their minds. Rain Spell also demonstrates the affinity that
people have to “magic.” Why does fiction sell well? Why do people
enjoy what they are well aware is make-believe? Sometimes seriousness
and the ordinary is just simply boring.
In comparison, the artist of Umbrella Liability Protection chose to
instill mystery just as the artist of the previous piece had done,
though through different, more comical elements. The medium of the
piece is by photograph in sepia. Due to the lack of color in the
artwork, lighting takes on a heavier role in this piece than in Rain
Spell. Distributed throughout the piece evenly, the lighting in the
piece is not so dark that the painting feels macabre, though it is not
so bright that the subject seems jumpily cheerful. Instead, the light
is subdued enough to produce, with the addition of a well-dressed man
sitting upon a ladder at a beach, another oblivious-to-the-bizarre
that also was emitted from the previous artwork. The photograph
“breaks” one of the rules of art that states that horizons should
remain horizontal by adding a tilt to the shot. This might have been
done to add to the foreboding effect. If one takes into account of the
title, Umbrella Liability Protection, one realizes that the artwork is
a literal rendering of a figurative definition. Literally, according
to the LMS Prolink Ltd. page, umbrella liability protection is,
“designed to protect you and your family against catastrophic lawsuits
or judgments.” With this given information, the piece undertakes a
humorous tone. This thus qualifies it to be a nice piece of artwork,
for it attempts to bend away from the norm. It demonstrates how, as
humans, we must learn to laugh through life. Not everything should be
taken seriously. The photograph also demonstrates how fear-driven
people of the United States can be at times. In today’s society, so
many people are in search of insurance of all sorts, they might even
be afraid of their own shadow. The umbrella concept here denotes
protection—a place where one could sit under the shade of safety,
perhaps.
Both of the pieces play off the element of oddness to grab hold of
their audience’s attention. Although the two themes surrounding the
umbrellas are quite different, they both show how humans are curious
in nature. Automatically humans search for a pattern—a picture that
makes sense out of what seems like nonsense.