by Aron Hegyi
Hi! I'm here to tell you about a pointillist piece, "Under The Lamp". It was painted by Albert Dubois-Pillet in 1888. Mainly, there is a lamp, a Chinese or Japanese inkwell, a letter, and another painting in the background by the same artist. The tabletop lamp, probably an oil lamp, is about two feet high, and is white on the bottom and reddish-yellow-greenish and flowery on the top part of the lamp. This lamp was probably used for light to write the letter. The inkwell has a face on it and is mainly black in color. It was probably used for ink to write the letter. It was also oval-shaped. But where did the pen go? We don't know where the pen is. It could be somewhere else and the writer has gone off looking for it. The letter is on a yellow piece of paper, but what is written on it? Maybe you can figure it out. Whose room is this? This might be the artist's room. The painting in the back is also a question. Why did he want to include another of his paintings in it? What is the meaning of the painting back there? Also, why is there nobody in the room?
You could make a lot of stories with this piece. A narrative painting is a painting that tells a story and allows the viewer to get involved.
But there is another possibility. When Bill Hennessey, director of the U of M Museum of Art, showed us around the museum, he carried the painting with him, and put it in other groups of paintings. When he hung up the painting in a group of still life pictures, it might have suggested that the painting was a still life of the four objects that I described earlier. A still life is a group of objects that are put together in an arrangement that is pleasing to the eye.
Lastly, the painting could have been abstract. Abstract art is art
that does not really have an identifiable subject. The painting has a lamp in
it, so the connections between the light that the painting is hung in and the
fact that the painting hints about light may make it a painting about light,
and so it would be abstract in that way. Abstract art is a very modern style
of work. This piece could have been any type of work if you give good reasoning.
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