Connie Qu
Mrs Harman, Year 10 Art
I and the Village by Marc Chagall
And
Zebra Head 11 Tyre Sculpture by Yong Ho ji
I and the Village
Mark Chagall, 1911
Oil on canvas; 192.1 cm × 151.4 cm
I and the Village, is a cubist oil on canvas painted by Russian-French artist, Marc Chagall. The painting measures 192.1 cm × 151.4 cm in size and it is currently displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
The painting shows a sheep in the top left and the green face of a man in the bottom right staring at each other in the foreground. The sheep holds another painting within it, a picture depicting a woman, possibly a maid milking a cow, or a goat. The green faced man wears a sailor’s cap, and holds a glowing tree. He also wears a St. Andrews necklace. Both the sheep and the green faced man are facing each other. In the background is a man holding a scythe and an upside-down female playing a violin, advancing to the houses ahead of them. They are found on the top of the painting, placed in the middle of the staring duel of the sheep and the green faced man. A path descends from where the man and the woman are standing, leading down between the main characters, the sheep and the man. The painting is made up of very bright, contrasting colours.
Despite the darkness of the black in the painting, the simplicity of the colour scheme gives it a joyous yet melancholic feel. Primary colours are mainly used, with a large majority of white also included. The face of the man is in a dull shade of hunter green, contrasting with the blue and grey of the sheep and the bright rogue red of the path between them. The man holding the scythe wears a black shirt, and the woman in front of him has a sky-blue dress on. In the background, the houses are painted in with muted primary colours, with a mustard yellow, a cobalt blue and a faded crimson red. Black is used to paint the sky, and it is also used in many different areas of the painting, shadowing the canvas, producing a realistic looking effect to the viewer and brightening the surrounding colours. White is used as highlights across the middle of the painting, and dabs of white paint around the small holy tree that the face is holding gives the tree a glowing look. The overall colour scheme used is saturated towards the outside of the artwork, and warmer colours are placed towards the centre point and balance the colours out, as the artist uses acidic primary colours to fill the painting in. The contradiction of the inharmonious colours of blue, green, red and yellow, with Chagall’s use of simple and pure colours convey the emotions of a child. As well as the use of unique colours, the bold lines of the painting also hint the cubists traditional use of perspective of a two-dimensional effect.
Big bold outlines are applied to enhance the effect of the flat surface the artist wants to convey as a cubist painting. The early analytical cubism is portrayed through this painting through the lines that clearly separ...
