final post

Rene Magritte’s painting titled “Empire of Light” created in 1953-54; I saw it hanging in the Peggy Guggenheim gallery when we were in Venice. This was not a required place to visit, but we had a free day and the Guggenheim was one of the places that a majority of the class went to. I was lucky enough to wander into this gallery later in the day and there were not many people so I had a lot of these amazing works of art all to my self!
The piece of art that I choose was this painting called the “Empire of Light” it was a stunningly realistic painting showing a street scene; house, street light, tree and a little fence. The interesting thing about this picture is that the foreground was all dark as if it were night time, but the sky was a brilliant, glowing blue with perfect little clouds scattered throughout the sky. This created a spectacular contrast between the dark foreground with everything so dark and quiet, and the background, which seemed so real that it might start moving if you watched it long enough.
I’m not completely sure why this image appealed to me so very much, but its contrast between night time and day time, light and dark, stillness and movement its so strong that its hard to look at any other picture in the room. It sucks you in right away, from clear across the room. Had these two different times of day not been combined into one, the image would have been very boring and typical. I think that’s what makes it so interesting when they are combined; it’s this image of a clean neat little house, showing what seemed to be the perfect neighborhood. It’s the classic image of a suburban home, but thrown into confusion by putting it in this state of both night and day at the same time.
The framing and position of the subject and its accoutrements has been carefully placed, just so that it feels so everyday and normal, an image you would expect to see in almost every neighborhood in America. It makes you wonder why the artist made the house and surrounding area in night and the sky in day, why not the other way around? Maybe its purpose is to make you think twice about how normal and safe this home looks, and maybe wonder if it really is. What’s just inside that window? What goes on in this neighborhood? The sky remains blue, clear and clean showing its purity, the sky is just there, nothing sinister or unknown about it. This seems almost as if its pointing out the purity and innocence of nature versus the dark and often damaging nature of people and our habitats.