This image is a variation of the notion of White Winter. Color plays a significant role in this image. White is pervasive. The blue of the frozen lake is so characteristically White it almost becomes a variation of White rather than a variation of Blue. This brings into question the very definition of color. With this image, the answer is variation.
An attempt to stand out and at the same time blend in is at play with this image. White covers the landscape, blanketing all Green life. Yet, amidst this White stands a single blooming tree of Green. Blend and stand out. The artist’s signature on the bottom left blends in with the White of the image, yet with enough variation for the viewer to be able to see and read. Blend and stand out.
In the middle of the whiteness is the pond and surrounding the pond are fences, well wood structured akin to what my mind considered a fence though these are falling apart and hold nothing in or out. The whiteness isolates and scarcity of other color limits the presence of life. The sole tree so shadowed in the glare of the whiteness it is grey with tinges of blue or green. The whiteness is colder than the snow it depicts. The desolation of the functionless fence isolates. This photo isolates.
Where does the sky begin? Where does the pond end? The whites intertwine. The depth of the pond is a crevasse, a mountain range. The trees are thick like they are clouds. The landscape is not captured in this image; this image is the landscape. It is an unnatural landscape constituted in the natural. To top it off, the artist's signature is twofold: it turns whites into art, and it flattens the landscape in which it is topographically implicated.
This image is like a toy model, so pristine, with its glass water and smooth titanium white paint. The image is whole in this frame but seems to connect to much more. But if what's outside the frame is forgotten a frozen universe is all present in a pocket sized space.
This image is so calming. It is sweet and simple, evoking nostalgic emotions in me.
The textures that shape it give it an old time essence, an air of antiquity, and a wisdom to match. Staring into it, I notice that my mind is diving deep, as if the pond scene is not just flat on the screen but thick with breathtaking beauty.
This image is so incredible because it is composed of this wise old quality, like an eldest grandparent bestowing wisdom on a youthful viewer.
The image lacks motion, standing as still as the cold winter day depicted. With the lack of motion color becomes the focus of the image. While the blue pond appears gray and blends with the white snow at points the dark green and brown trees pop out against the colorless background. Despite the contrast of colors the stillness of the image remains, the disjunction of colors doesn't create an event. This is because the colors are not in conflict, rather they peacefully coexist within the image.
Stillness permeates this image. An off white, light gray hue colors this image. Such nebulous colors enable it to look at once flat and have depth. Lines are blurred. Where is the sky? Does it even exist inside this frame? Yes, it does because the sky is reflected in the frozen pond. Even though this image may appear flat it is expansive capturing the sky.
Frozen whiteness blankets over the landscape, layering nature within itself. A few forlorn hedges and fence posts poke above the epidermis of snow. A covered pond concaves the colorless landscape into a third dimension, shadows on the hillside reflect a soft umbra. The tree transfigures into smudge, a blot on the background of blankness. Color is clothed in icy frigidity, negated to opaque nothingness. Who said spring was the cruelest month?
Where is the viewer in this image? The image is spatially confusing because the snow is ubiquitous. The snow makes it difficult to measure the image, for example: how far things (like the fences) are apart, or if there are hills, lakes, and other terrestrial variables. The image is becoming because it inhabits so many dimensions of depth, length, and location. Snow enhances those dimensions partly because it is mundane and repeats. Simple snow they say, this white blanket is exceedingly difficult to navigate through. Where is the viewer?
A blanket of snow. A pond frozen over. A white sky that blends into the earth. One only green tree. This is an image of emptiness, of loneliness; an image of a desolate white-colored world. Yet this is also an image of life and its infinite circle; an image of a green tree magically sprouting from nothing, and image of a fence which could not have gotten there on its own. This is an image of duality; an image of a frozen, empty life, yet simultaneously an image of a new beginning, of a life waiting to happen.
The pervading white in the image, whether or not it is thought to represent snow, embodies the feeling of nothingness. Snow or not, the whiteness seems to fade to nothing, to lead nowhere. It is an unknown place. It lacks geographical certainty or contextualization. It IS the middle of nowhere. This lack of context, this nothingness takes the focus of this image. The ostensible focal point, the lake, trees, fence, etc. are merely objects that in their very existing and being placed in the image only create its space as a viable geographical location which then works to draw attention to its lack of definition. It is a paradox. The image represents a real scene but that scene is nowhere. It is in the undefined region, and therefore can't be real.
This image is not the capturing of a landscape but the privileging of paint's play. White is not an abstract idea, the effect of infinite light, it has a weight and a rhythm and a swagger. Each individual stroke of white declares its existence and performs its perfect ecstatic state. The smallest atoms of whiteness whisper the essence of themselves. Some whites float, some whites sink. Some are warm, some cool. Some liquid, some solid. This earth is painted white down to its very core/ this earth is white down to its very core. The viewer cannot tell where paint stops and canvas starts. An empty canvas is just a pool where white can float amongst its ripples. There is no empty, there never was.
The image is a snowy expanse of white. It is difficult to tell where the horizon is. The snow on the ground blends seamlessly into the white sky. The trees on the right side are so undetailed that they look like nothing more than splashes of black paint. The posts around the lake themselves seem to fade into the whiteness on their edges. There is nothing to hold onto in the image. Everything in the image appears to be ungrounded and unattached to anything else. It makes the viewer feel as though he is floating away into a white abyss. The image and its whiteness is frameless and allows the viewer to float and outside the edgeless borders of the image.
The contrasting colors that come together here draw my eyes to edges. I see what looks like a pond, and how it is lined by mounds of white snow and a dark fence. It isn't outlined, it only draws its edges around the other stuff that's there.
The same goes for the snow and sky. I can't find where one begins and one ends, because they're not outlined. Maybe that top right corner is the sky? I can't be too sure, though it feels right, because it's not given to me.
What I see here is a coming to life of an image, created not out of outlines, but out of different elements emerging and bumping against one another.
Details of a landscape are etched into—-or rather, out of—-an all-encompassing greyness. The colors fade in and out of this grey at a speed that is slow and gradual. In turn, this speed of the muted colors dictates my taking in of the image. It slows me down that I may observe the subtleties as I squint to notice the soft details of the fence fading in the background and the sparse shrubbery surrounding the water. As my focus zooms in to out, I more readily see of the vastness of this space, haziness of the scene, and noiselessness of activity. And such are the very affects of the winter season that come from this image, as if the image were winter itself.
Frozen solid? Frozen silence. Temperature and sound are both rendered chilled. the silence of this image moves to deafen me. How solitary is this image?
sky and snow become one to surround, this image moves to encase in cold.
Breaks from the persistent white? Black, blue, gray.
This image is not still or silent. Although the majority of the image is wrapped in a blanket of snow, the great, dark tree on the right is a blur because it is moving so quickly. The contrast of black and white in this image does not argue there is no middle ground between the still snow and the swaying tree, it calls attention to the in-between. The blue-white of the lake shows that the lake is not frozen solid, there is some slight movement within it. The grey of the sky inches towards the viewer. This 'frozen' image is a kaleidoscope of movement and speed.
The winteriness of this image points to something primordial about image. At first glance, there is an appeal to something outside the frame, to the title, to winter, to the concept of winter, to the calm of winter that is a reprieve from the terror that winter has in store, i.e. the affect of winter. There is a dumbness in winter that seems to be helpful in some ways at the site of seeing this image. The dumbness of winter affords a receptivity to the presencing of the forms and antiforms of this image. The image holds the antiforms in the space of the image. The tree presences forth not as the tree that was placed in the image, though that may in fact be how the artist composed the image (the process is of little or no importance here), but comes to presence out of the its limit that the wholeness of the image lends to it. The contrast between the darkness of the tree, in its form as tree, and the whiteness of the snow as antiform that is given form by the fact of the image, marks the primordial presencing of treee as tree and snow as snow in their most intimate relation that allows them to presence in the image as themselves. We must not privilege form over antiform here, we do not see through the tree where the whiteness of the snow is visible as if through the tree. No, the primordial presencing of winter tree and winter snow says that tree and snow are of the same, of the same matter, of the same image. The whiteness that we see in the form of the tree, is part of the presencing of the tree, is of the tree as much as it is of the snow, as much as form and antiform are of the same, of the same matter, and of the same image.
What is interesting about the image is that varying its size dramatically changes how it is perceived (e.g. examining it close-up opposed to looking at a minimized version of it). For example, upon viewing the minimized version, the image appears to be a typical landscape, containing snowy terrain, a lake and a big green tree next to it. However, a closer examination allows the viewer to scrutinize individual objects previously overlooked and taken for granted; in fact, this interrogation renders these objects problematic. These objects, ostensibly stable and certain, begin to morph and shift upon a closer look. What once unequivocally appeared to be a single tree, anchored by a single stump and branching foliage, becomes ambiguous. The viewer sees that neither the stump nor the foliage could possibly be simple parts of a singular tree; an object initially taken for granted becomes radically unfamiliar. Thus, the image transforms itself before the viewer’s eyes; it is indeed deceiving and complex.
This painting at first glance looked like a picture. This effect was partially achieved through the work done by the pond in producing its reflection. This could possibly be because there is no reference point to the space the pond is reflecting, but the way the clouds and water and the wholeness of the pond swirl together show the pond as being in flux. It perhaps is the pond swirling between frozen on its surface and fluid underneath. This is very much the effect of the painting. The image is frozen on the canvas, but through the way the brushstrokes portray the reflections of light, the image is very much fluid. It goes like water. Or water in winter? Or Winter? It goes like winter. The blanket of snow narrows the posts and tree trunks, enveloping their borders with its brilliant white and icy static. But the snow too concedes to the trees fluffing a bit, as snow can itself go. This is a precise and accurate winter.
This image offers no refuge. But that being the case, there’s certainly no where to go. It’s going to be like this until it changes. It will be cold until it starts to warm…but not the cold of this image. The blanketing cold of this image is permanent in the moment of my seeing. The movement is one of settling, but a settling for its own sake, not a sacrificial settling. A slow, inward settling, that only settles, slowly, never arriving at “settled.”
This painting feels cold. The tone of colors used don’t just show the viewer the cold, instead it actually makes the viewer feet cold. The air contracts and pulls at the viewer’s chest as if she were out on a cold dry day. The Photo is pleasing to the eye but in many ways painful for the body. The stark isolated pond with blue that is hardly different from the barren landscape around it makes the viewer feel isolated and cold as if they are in the painting rather than standing outside of it.
the ambient space of the image figures quite prominently in this image, giving it a distributed feeling. We are placed at a distance, at an elevated vantage point to this wintry scene. The muted coloration of the abalone lake and the dark black ground this ephemeral image, but just barely. If our last two images were concept driven, this is certainly affect driven. This weightlessness of winter, an abalone lake reflecting a swimming sky, the streaked and warped horizon, and the iridescent glaze coating the painted scene all add up to an affect of breathless rippling movement the impression of ethereal bliss.
I cannot help but think in light of the reading that a definite set of questions is being asked here: Is this a percept? Does it stand on its own? How?
As “nonhuman landscapes of nature” percepts must be wrested from human perceptions in order to preserve an event of seeing that happens independently of the ephemeral original seeing. While this painting is perfectly recognizable as a winter landscape with a small pond, some trees, and fence-posts, this “resemblance” does in fact seem dependent not on reference to some perception of a landscape but on the expressive intensity of the painting itself. No insight about this painting would be gained by venturing to this piece of land, if indeed such a “real place” even exists.
This image overwhelms, overfills the viewer with its bleary monochromatic emptiness. Of course, one function of this rendering of is to make even the subtlest contrasts seem supernaturally striking. The snowdrift cutting diagonally in front of the pond is more dramatic than any assemblage of snow I can remember seeing. The trees, however, with their black and multi-colored swift blotches don’t really strike the same drama despite what would seem much sharper contrast. Perhaps such contrast simply doesn’t make sense in this scheme of sensations. This image seems to prove how “blocs need pockets of air and emptiness, because even the void is sensation”. Not to say the trees are an aberration of the painting’s visual logic, but that their deadpan sharpness is a fascinating feature of this logic.
This image is full, but washed out and clean. It brings a fresh feeling and in its simplicity contains multitudes. It shows how many ways white can go. It's pallet is bland but also complex and infinite. The many ways white can go and be something on canvas, rather than white on nothing.
Its all encompassing and leads the eye across its landscape.
Why does this image feel desolate? What is the source of its negative affect. Obscuration must play a part. While some forms are clearly delimited, most are not. The viewer cannot see where pond ends and snow field begins, where snow field ends and sky begins, where the fence ends and the ground begins. It's all a wash, the individual forms of which left obscured. This unknowing is darkness as winter is darkness, as the tone of this image is that darkness. The one expression life in this image is a hole of dark nothingness; the tree is black and without detail.
It’s not clear how all this white space reveals a landscape. Tiny detailed lines and differing shades of white aid the viewer in making sense of this image. With the right set of eyes somehow a landscape forges in the space. From a macro view (that is looking at it as a whole) it all adds up. But any close inspection of the details ruptures that established macro perception. That is to say, the details don’t washout when observed closely, as they seem to when you view the image all at once. In fact the details like the fence and the unfrozen side of the pond are extremely complicated when closely viewed. In this way the image really emulates the experience of a sort of human seeing, where details washout to form a macro conceptual viewing.
This image has varying degrees of intensity and attention to detail. The snow gathering on the right of the pond has clearly been given a great deal of stylistic attention, while the biggest tree and the snow in the background have less finesse, less finish. This extra finesse, coupled with the prevalence of whiteness allows certainparts of the painting to insist upon themselves more than others. The speed of the image does indeed seem slow, it conveys a quietness, it feels cold, but not in an uninviting way. That is to say, the multitude of whiteness in the painting conveys a kind of tabula rasa, an invitation to not only interpret at will, but to dive into that snow, disrupt the quiet scene, examine the fence a little closer. The image calms the viewer, but has the potential to rile him/her up at well.
The image seems unapologetic about its status as a painting. It simply could not be a photograph. I think this lends to its mystery.
By smearing definitive lines of particularity, a new particularity is formed. This particularity is a certain smoothness that creates a less fractionalized and polarizing image and presents more of an eloquent and wholeness to the image. It’s a quiet and tranquil landscape. Indeed, the image is not something to be seen, but something rather to be experienced. Uncertain edges pervade rigged outlines of restraints and dictations. This calmness of mood soothes and sedates. From the non abrasive trees to the pervasive white snow, this image is an agent for relaxation.
This image is the frozen solitude of seeing. The coloring of this image performs a motionless seeing in the event of seeing. To look at it is to become static. White blankets the scene and begins to blend with the other colors in the image. Everything becomes a variation of white. The tree, which is the darkest coloring in the image, still maintains a foundation of white within its foliage. Not even its dark coloring can escape the rhizomic distribution of white. This image is able to demonstrate how white can go in this particular instance. It is not blank or void of substance, rather the image is full of the multifarious ways in which white can go. It is as if the image has been filled with white as opposed to covering the white space with coloring and marks.
This image is rather to be felt. There’s no outline to grasp unto, everything seems to have came out of a simple brush stroke of snow. The darkness of that tree seems to be colder then the ice and snow. It feels like there might be a sign of life behind that tree but tree’s dark color shadows everything. The tree seems to bring shadow to the entire lightless image. The lack of boundaries gives out a sense being trapped. There’s nothing to grasp or grab but only sense of being lost and dead stillness.
That pond is so confusing and complex I can't even begin to make sense of how it goes. I didn't even think it was a pond until I read some of the comments here... and I'm still not fully convinced.
This image messes up my depth perception - to me the "pond" looks more like an abyss. The platform on the right looks like it's on top of a cliff. And then the trees. They look like rorschach inkblots and seem to be very flat, almost as if the artist accidentally spilled some ink onto the image.
By mixing up different depths throughout the image, some which seem possible, others impossible, the whole image seems to have a surreal reality-ness to it.
Everything has a form, yet there are no clear outlines. The form of white snow paints a white canvas, casting white shadows when snow takes new forms. It performs a haptic knowledge of the different texture of snow, of ice, of tree bush. The trees appear as aimless strolls of a stroking paintbrush, coming to form not before they touch the canvas, but in the very act of doing so, of encountering snow. And in the act of encountering tree, snow too is formed.
the beauty of this image is the suggestion of so much with so little--so few brush strokes to create a sense of white so massive that it blankets all we see. The casual drift of the scene as it disappears towards the left of the frame, gives it a dream-like quality, as thought it could all just dissolve into nothing, at the same time speaking to a realistic snow drift that blots out all else.
What is most interesting about the image is that it makes it more difficult for the viewer to distinguish it into clearly identifiable parts. The reader cannot make clear distinctions between where the snow ends, the pond begins, where the sky is, etc. Thus, the viewer sees the image not as a series of distinct objects that begin and end at different points, but as elements that are more intertwined with one another. The focus thus shifts from analyzing the image as containing particular objects and thus having a given meaning towards the image itself and its own aesthetic possibilities.
At the exact moment of perception, the viewer is submerged in snow, whites, grays, blending together without an external point of reference. What's most startling is that, undeniably, the viewer is looking at an image of a painting. The strokes, the detail, all of it on the canvas let us know that it was "originally" a painting- but now, we are left looking into our computer screens at an image of this painting. Where is the painting? Where are we? Can we jump into the painting without ignoring the fact that we are seeing the photographer's seeing of a painting, that once was seen by an artist before a snowy pond? (or from an artist's imagination?) The weight of the image pulls down on the viewer, not exciting her, but making her blend in with the scene and experience the transition from 'concept of snow' to the immediate 'affect' of seeing this image.
The picture IS cold and calm--its horizontal orientation lays flat, denying the viewer any sort of action or motion. As many state above me, each part of the image blends into the other, which CREATES this sense of calm; with nothing to stick out against, the eye is soothed into perusing the cold image as a whole. Even the brushstrokes of snow and ripple are subtle and small, allowing the image to look even more calm.
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Interesting to note that white is seen as the blank, empty canvas. Here, white is filling.
The snow engulfs the portrait of a winter pond, imparting its personality to the viewer. The image confronts its audience, in an instance of aggression. It depends on Aristotelian memory, a previous perception of a landscape, and through this hearkening back to a previous knowing of the form magnifies the event that is this landscape. The trees resemble a Rorshach inkblot, frozen.
Everything is covered in white except the trees. They repel the snow. They rebel against it. This image's affect is a sort of bleak hopelessness punctuated by that blot of trees.
We talked in class today about the power of an image to stand on its own. I had looked at this image last week and had since had computer problems (which is why I'm late to blog), but even though I couldn't see the image, it was still there. It was in my mind and also on the blog. It will forever be on the blog. Does that mean it will forever be powerful?
I love the starkness and stillness of the image. Interestingly, this picture, 'frozen' as it is, a static composition of paint on paper, suggests a lack - of movement, of sound, of change. The image is seemingly 'stamped' in time - the trees, the fence and fenceposts convey a grave and wistful endurance of The Self against a brutal force of nature that actively works to erase any trace of the individual. The predominance of white tones throughout affect a spirit of the inhuman winning out.
The thin, cold and brittle tree stands with confidence and weight amidst the fluid whiteness around. Contrast serves to both highlight the tree amidst the whiteout while at the same time dampening and erasing the borders that distinguish the contours in the snow, the horizon and the sky. In this case the white, airy and light qualities of snow and sky are betrayed by the oppressive weight of the pervasive whiteness. Within the image to conceptions of weightiness and gravity are present. They derive their similar qualities from diverse origins, however they both rely on the same means to them, contrast.
Each week, we will consider an image. This image may come from anywhere—from a painting, the news, an art photograph, a picture of my child.
Your job is to read this image. You need write only four lines; you may write more. Inflect the image. Give it a spin. Make us see what we may not be seeing. Take up the image, do something with it, then give it back to us—in words.
The goal is multifold. It is to learn to reckon a diversity of images. It is to learn the art of the riff, the spin, the take. And, in the end, I hope we have created an exquisite symphony, a chorus of voices, each distinct, each singing an image in its own register.
ATTENDANCE IS REQUIRED. You may miss 3 classes during the semester. For each class missed after that, your grade will be lowered a full grade—from an A to a B.
EVERY weekend, I will post an image on this blog. By Thursday's class, you must write a response to that image as a comment on this blog. -You will have to create a Google account. -Please use your name in your identity so I know who you are when you post your comment. If you already have a Google identity but it does not reflect your name, please create a new one. -Your comment can be brief; in fact, it should be—anywhere from 3-10 lines. Try to make it pithy, astute, sharp. -These are not optional: each one you miss will translate into the loss of a full grade for your class participation grade.
There will be three papers scattered through the semester; they will be @ two pages long. These are not optional. If you fail to do one, you will fail the class.
Grading -Class participation: 30% -Paper 1: 20% -Paper 2: 20% -Paper 3: 30% -I WILL NOT GRANT INCOMPLETES.
This image is a variation of the notion of White Winter. Color plays a significant role in this image. White is pervasive. The blue of the frozen lake is so characteristically White it almost becomes a variation of White rather than a variation of Blue. This brings into question the very definition of color. With this image, the answer is variation.
ReplyDeleteAn attempt to stand out and at the same time blend in is at play with this image. White covers the landscape, blanketing all Green life. Yet, amidst this White stands a single blooming tree of Green. Blend and stand out. The artist’s signature on the bottom left blends in with the White of the image, yet with enough variation for the viewer to be able to see and read. Blend and stand out.
In the middle of the whiteness is the pond and surrounding the pond are fences, well wood structured akin to what my mind considered a fence though these are falling apart and hold nothing in or out. The whiteness isolates and scarcity of other color limits the presence of life. The sole tree so shadowed in the glare of the whiteness it is grey with tinges of blue or green. The whiteness is colder than the snow it depicts. The desolation of the functionless fence isolates. This photo isolates.
ReplyDeleteWhere does the sky begin? Where does the pond end? The whites intertwine. The depth of the pond is a crevasse, a mountain range. The trees are thick like they are clouds. The landscape is not captured in this image; this image is the landscape. It is an unnatural landscape constituted in the natural. To top it off, the artist's signature is twofold: it turns whites into art, and it flattens the landscape in which it is topographically implicated.
ReplyDeleteThis image is like a toy model, so pristine, with its glass water and smooth titanium white paint. The image is whole in this frame but seems to connect to much more. But if what's outside the frame is forgotten a frozen universe is all present in a pocket sized space.
ReplyDeleteThis image is so calming. It is sweet and simple, evoking nostalgic emotions in me.
ReplyDeleteThe textures that shape it give it an old time essence, an air of antiquity, and a wisdom to match. Staring into it, I notice that my mind is diving deep, as if the pond scene is not just flat on the screen but thick with breathtaking beauty.
This image is so incredible because it is composed of this wise old quality, like an eldest grandparent bestowing wisdom on a youthful viewer.
The image lacks motion, standing as still as the cold winter day depicted. With the lack of motion color becomes the focus of the image. While the blue pond appears gray and blends with the white snow at points the dark green and brown trees pop out against the colorless background. Despite the contrast of colors the stillness of the image remains, the disjunction of colors doesn't create an event. This is because the colors are not in conflict, rather they peacefully coexist within the image.
ReplyDeleteStillness permeates this image. An off white, light gray hue colors this image. Such nebulous colors enable it to look at once flat and have depth. Lines are blurred. Where is the sky? Does it even exist inside this frame? Yes, it does because the sky is reflected in the frozen pond. Even though this image may appear flat it is expansive capturing the sky.
ReplyDeleteFrozen whiteness blankets over the landscape, layering nature within itself. A few forlorn hedges and fence posts poke above the epidermis of snow. A covered pond concaves the colorless landscape into a third dimension, shadows on the hillside reflect a soft umbra. The tree transfigures into smudge, a blot on the background of blankness. Color is clothed in icy frigidity, negated to opaque nothingness. Who said spring was the cruelest month?
ReplyDeleteWhere is the viewer in this image? The image is spatially confusing because the snow is ubiquitous. The snow makes it difficult to measure the image, for example: how far things (like the fences) are apart, or if there are hills, lakes, and other terrestrial variables. The image is becoming because it inhabits so many dimensions of depth, length, and location. Snow enhances those dimensions partly because it is mundane and repeats. Simple snow they say, this white blanket is exceedingly difficult to navigate through. Where is the viewer?
ReplyDeleteA blanket of snow. A pond frozen over. A white sky that blends into the earth. One only green tree. This is an image of emptiness, of loneliness; an image of a desolate white-colored world. Yet this is also an image of life and its infinite circle; an image of a green tree magically sprouting from nothing, and image of a fence which could not have gotten there on its own. This is an image of duality; an image of a frozen, empty life, yet simultaneously an image of a new beginning, of a life waiting to happen.
ReplyDeleteThe pervading white in the image, whether or not it is thought to represent snow, embodies the feeling of nothingness. Snow or not, the whiteness seems to fade to nothing, to lead nowhere. It is an unknown place. It lacks geographical certainty or contextualization. It IS the middle of nowhere. This lack of context, this nothingness takes the focus of this image. The ostensible focal point, the lake, trees, fence, etc. are merely objects that in their very existing and being placed in the image only create its space as a viable geographical location which then works to draw attention to its lack of definition. It is a paradox. The image represents a real scene but that scene is nowhere. It is in the undefined region, and therefore can't be real.
ReplyDeleteThis image is not the capturing of a landscape but the privileging of paint's play. White is not an abstract idea, the effect of infinite light, it has a weight and a rhythm and a swagger. Each individual stroke of white declares its existence and performs its perfect ecstatic state. The smallest atoms of whiteness whisper the essence of themselves. Some whites float, some whites sink. Some are warm, some cool. Some liquid, some solid. This earth is painted white down to its very core/ this earth is white down to its very core. The viewer cannot tell where paint stops and canvas starts. An empty canvas is just a pool where white can float amongst its ripples. There is no empty, there never was.
ReplyDeleteThe image is a snowy expanse of white. It is difficult to tell where the horizon is. The snow on the ground blends seamlessly into the white sky. The trees on the right side are so undetailed that they look like nothing more than splashes of black paint. The posts around the lake themselves seem to fade into the whiteness on their edges. There is nothing to hold onto in the image. Everything in the image appears to be ungrounded and unattached to anything else. It makes the viewer feel as though he is floating away into a white abyss. The image and its whiteness is frameless and allows the viewer to float and outside the edgeless borders of the image.
ReplyDeleteThe contrasting colors that come together here draw my eyes to edges. I see what looks like a pond, and how it is lined by mounds of white snow and a dark fence. It isn't outlined, it only draws its edges around the other stuff that's there.
ReplyDeleteThe same goes for the snow and sky. I can't find where one begins and one ends, because they're not outlined. Maybe that top right corner is the sky? I can't be too sure, though it feels right, because it's not given to me.
What I see here is a coming to life of an image, created not out of outlines, but out of different elements emerging and bumping against one another.
Details of a landscape are etched into—-or rather, out of—-an all-encompassing greyness. The colors fade in and out of this grey at a speed that is slow and gradual. In turn, this speed of the muted colors dictates my taking in of the image. It slows me down that I may observe the subtleties as I squint to notice the soft details of the fence fading in the background and the sparse shrubbery surrounding the water. As my focus zooms in to out, I more readily see of the vastness of this space, haziness of the scene, and noiselessness of activity. And such are the very affects of the winter season that come from this image, as if the image were winter itself.
ReplyDeleteFrozen solid? Frozen silence.
ReplyDeleteTemperature and sound are both rendered chilled.
the silence of this image moves to deafen me. How solitary is this image?
sky and snow become one to surround, this image moves to encase in cold.
Breaks from the persistent white? Black, blue, gray.
We only see in cold
This image is not still or silent. Although the majority of the image is wrapped in a blanket of snow, the great, dark tree on the right is a blur because it is moving so quickly. The contrast of black and white in this image does not argue there is no middle ground between the still snow and the swaying tree, it calls attention to the in-between. The blue-white of the lake shows that the lake is not frozen solid, there is some slight movement within it. The grey of the sky inches towards the viewer. This 'frozen' image is a kaleidoscope of movement and speed.
ReplyDeleteThe winteriness of this image points to something primordial about image. At first glance, there is an appeal to something outside the frame, to the title, to winter, to the concept of winter, to the calm of winter that is a reprieve from the terror that winter has in store, i.e. the affect of winter. There is a dumbness in winter that seems to be helpful in some ways at the site of seeing this image. The dumbness of winter affords a receptivity to the presencing of the forms and antiforms of this image. The image holds the antiforms in the space of the image. The tree presences forth not as the tree that was placed in the image, though that may in fact be how the artist composed the image (the process is of little or no importance here), but comes to presence out of the its limit that the wholeness of the image lends to it. The contrast between the darkness of the tree, in its form as tree, and the whiteness of the snow as antiform that is given form by the fact of the image, marks the primordial presencing of treee as tree and snow as snow in their most intimate relation that allows them to presence in the image as themselves. We must not privilege form over antiform here, we do not see through the tree where the whiteness of the snow is visible as if through the tree. No, the primordial presencing of winter tree and winter snow says that tree and snow are of the same, of the same matter, of the same image. The whiteness that we see in the form of the tree, is part of the presencing of the tree, is of the tree as much as it is of the snow, as much as form and antiform are of the same, of the same matter, and of the same image.
ReplyDeleteWhat is interesting about the image is that varying its size dramatically changes how it is perceived (e.g. examining it close-up opposed to looking at a minimized version of it). For example, upon viewing the minimized version, the image appears to be a typical landscape, containing snowy terrain, a lake and a big green tree next to it. However, a closer examination allows the viewer to scrutinize individual objects previously overlooked and taken for granted; in fact, this interrogation renders these objects problematic. These objects, ostensibly stable and certain, begin to morph and shift upon a closer look. What once unequivocally appeared to be a single tree, anchored by a single stump and branching foliage, becomes ambiguous. The viewer sees that neither the stump nor the foliage could possibly be simple parts of a singular tree; an object initially taken for granted becomes radically unfamiliar. Thus, the image transforms itself before the viewer’s eyes; it is indeed deceiving and complex.
ReplyDeleteThis painting at first glance looked like a picture. This effect was partially achieved through the work done by the pond in producing its reflection. This could possibly be because there is no reference point to the space the pond is reflecting, but the way the clouds and water and the wholeness of the pond swirl together show the pond as being in flux. It perhaps is the pond swirling between frozen on its surface and fluid underneath. This is very much the effect of the painting. The image is frozen on the canvas, but through the way the brushstrokes portray the reflections of light, the image is very much fluid. It goes like water. Or water in winter? Or Winter? It goes like winter. The blanket of snow narrows the posts and tree trunks, enveloping their borders with its brilliant white and icy static. But the snow too concedes to the trees fluffing a bit, as snow can itself go. This is a precise and accurate winter.
ReplyDeleteThis image offers no refuge. But that being the case, there’s certainly no where to go. It’s going to be like this until it changes. It will be cold until it starts to warm…but not the cold of this image. The blanketing cold of this image is permanent in the moment of my seeing. The movement is one of settling, but a settling for its own sake, not a sacrificial settling. A slow, inward settling, that only settles, slowly, never arriving at “settled.”
ReplyDeleteI’ve never so much enjoyed the winter.
This painting feels cold. The tone of colors used don’t just show the viewer the cold, instead it actually makes the viewer feet cold. The air contracts and pulls at the viewer’s chest as if she were out on a cold dry day. The Photo is pleasing to the eye but in many ways painful for the body. The stark isolated pond with blue that is hardly different from the barren landscape around it makes the viewer feel isolated and cold as if they are in the painting rather than standing outside of it.
ReplyDeletethe ambient space of the image figures quite prominently in this image, giving it a distributed feeling. We are placed at a distance, at an elevated vantage point to this wintry scene. The muted coloration of the abalone lake and the dark black ground this ephemeral image, but just barely. If our last two images were concept driven, this is certainly affect driven. This weightlessness of winter, an abalone lake reflecting a swimming sky, the streaked and warped horizon, and the iridescent glaze coating the painted scene all add up to an affect of breathless rippling movement the impression of ethereal bliss.
ReplyDeleteI cannot help but think in light of the reading that a definite set of questions is being asked here: Is this a percept? Does it stand on its own? How?
ReplyDeleteAs “nonhuman landscapes of nature” percepts must be wrested from human perceptions in order to preserve an event of seeing that happens independently of the ephemeral original seeing. While this painting is perfectly recognizable as a winter landscape with a small pond, some trees, and fence-posts, this “resemblance” does in fact seem dependent not on reference to some perception of a landscape but on the expressive intensity of the painting itself. No insight about this painting would be gained by venturing to this piece of land, if indeed such a “real place” even exists.
This image overwhelms, overfills the viewer with its bleary monochromatic emptiness. Of course, one function of this rendering of is to make even the subtlest contrasts seem supernaturally striking. The snowdrift cutting diagonally in front of the pond is more dramatic than any assemblage of snow I can remember seeing. The trees, however, with their black and multi-colored swift blotches don’t really strike the same drama despite what would seem much sharper contrast. Perhaps such contrast simply doesn’t make sense in this scheme of sensations. This image seems to prove how “blocs need pockets of air and emptiness, because even the void is sensation”. Not to say the trees are an aberration of the painting’s visual logic, but that their deadpan sharpness is a fascinating feature of this logic.
The pond leaves me speechless.
This image is full, but washed out and clean. It brings a fresh feeling and in its simplicity contains multitudes. It shows how many ways white can go. It's pallet is bland but also complex and infinite. The many ways white can go and be something on canvas, rather than white on nothing.
ReplyDeleteIts all encompassing and leads the eye across its landscape.
Why does this image feel desolate? What is the source of its negative affect. Obscuration must play a part. While some forms are clearly delimited, most are not. The viewer cannot see where pond ends and snow field begins, where snow field ends and sky begins, where the fence ends and the ground begins. It's all a wash, the individual forms of which left obscured. This unknowing is darkness as winter is darkness, as the tone of this image is that darkness. The one expression life in this image is a hole of dark nothingness; the tree is black and without detail.
ReplyDeleteIt’s not clear how all this white space reveals a landscape. Tiny detailed lines and differing shades of white aid the viewer in making sense of this image. With the right set of eyes somehow a landscape forges in the space. From a macro view (that is looking at it as a whole) it all adds up. But any close inspection of the details ruptures that established macro perception. That is to say, the details don’t washout when observed closely, as they seem to when you view the image all at once. In fact the details like the fence and the unfrozen side of the pond are extremely complicated when closely viewed. In this way the image really emulates the experience of a sort of human seeing, where details washout to form a macro conceptual viewing.
ReplyDeleteThis image has varying degrees of intensity and attention to detail. The snow gathering on the right of the pond has clearly been given a great deal of stylistic attention, while the biggest tree and the snow in the background have less finesse, less finish. This extra finesse, coupled with the prevalence of whiteness allows certainparts of the painting to insist upon themselves more than others. The speed of the image does indeed seem slow, it conveys a quietness, it feels cold, but not in an uninviting way. That is to say, the multitude of whiteness in the painting conveys a kind of tabula rasa, an invitation to not only interpret at will, but to dive into that snow, disrupt the quiet scene, examine the fence a little closer. The image calms the viewer, but has the potential to rile him/her up at well.
ReplyDeleteThe image seems unapologetic about its status as a painting. It simply could not be a photograph. I think this lends to its mystery.
By smearing definitive lines of particularity, a new particularity is formed. This particularity is a certain smoothness that creates a less fractionalized and polarizing image and presents more of an eloquent and wholeness to the image. It’s a quiet and tranquil landscape. Indeed, the image is not something to be seen, but something rather to be experienced. Uncertain edges pervade rigged outlines of restraints and dictations. This calmness of mood soothes and sedates. From the non abrasive trees to the pervasive white snow, this image is an agent for relaxation.
ReplyDeleteThis image is the frozen solitude of seeing. The coloring of this image performs a motionless seeing in the event of seeing. To look at it is to become static. White blankets the scene and begins to blend with the other colors in the image. Everything becomes a variation of white. The tree, which is the darkest coloring in the image, still maintains a foundation of white within its foliage. Not even its dark coloring can escape the rhizomic distribution of white. This image is able to demonstrate how white can go in this particular instance. It is not blank or void of substance, rather the image is full of the multifarious ways in which white can go. It is as if the image has been filled with white as opposed to covering the white space with coloring and marks.
ReplyDeleteThis image is rather to be felt. There’s no outline to grasp unto, everything seems to have came out of a simple brush stroke of snow. The darkness of that tree seems to be colder then the ice and snow. It feels like there might be a sign of life behind that tree but tree’s dark color shadows everything. The tree seems to bring shadow to the entire lightless image. The lack of boundaries gives out a sense being trapped. There’s nothing to grasp or grab but only sense of being lost and dead stillness.
ReplyDeleteThat pond is so confusing and complex I can't even begin to make sense of how it goes. I didn't even think it was a pond until I read some of the comments here... and I'm still not fully convinced.
ReplyDeleteThis image messes up my depth perception - to me the "pond" looks more like an abyss. The platform on the right looks like it's on top of a cliff. And then the trees. They look like rorschach inkblots and seem to be very flat, almost as if the artist accidentally spilled some ink onto the image.
By mixing up different depths throughout the image, some which seem possible, others impossible, the whole image seems to have a surreal reality-ness to it.
Everything has a form, yet there are no clear outlines. The form of white snow paints a white canvas, casting white shadows when snow takes new forms.
ReplyDeleteIt performs a haptic knowledge of the different texture of snow, of ice, of tree bush. The trees appear as aimless strolls of a stroking paintbrush, coming to form not before they touch the canvas, but in the very act of doing so, of encountering snow. And in the act of encountering tree, snow too is formed.
the beauty of this image is the suggestion of so much with so little--so few brush strokes to create a sense of white so massive that it blankets all we see. The casual drift of the scene as it disappears towards the left of the frame, gives it a dream-like quality, as thought it could all just dissolve into nothing, at the same time speaking to a realistic snow drift that blots out all else.
ReplyDeleteWhat is most interesting about the image is that it makes it more difficult for the viewer to distinguish it into clearly identifiable parts. The reader cannot make clear distinctions between where the snow ends, the pond begins, where the sky is, etc. Thus, the viewer sees the image not as a series of distinct objects that begin and end at different points, but as elements that are more intertwined with one another. The focus thus shifts from analyzing the image as containing particular objects and thus having a given meaning towards the image itself and its own aesthetic possibilities.
ReplyDeleteAt the exact moment of perception, the viewer is submerged in snow, whites, grays, blending together without an external point of reference. What's most startling is that, undeniably, the viewer is looking at an image of a painting. The strokes, the detail, all of it on the canvas let us know that it was "originally" a painting- but now, we are left looking into our computer screens at an image of this painting. Where is the painting? Where are we? Can we jump into the painting without ignoring the fact that we are seeing the photographer's seeing of a painting, that once was seen by an artist before a snowy pond? (or from an artist's imagination?) The weight of the image pulls down on the viewer, not exciting her, but making her blend in with the scene and experience the transition from 'concept of snow' to the immediate 'affect' of seeing this image.
ReplyDeleteThe picture IS cold and calm--its horizontal orientation lays flat, denying the viewer any sort of action or motion. As many state above me, each part of the image blends into the other, which CREATES this sense of calm; with nothing to stick out against, the eye is soothed into perusing the cold image as a whole. Even the brushstrokes of snow and ripple are subtle and small, allowing the image to look even more calm.
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Interesting to note that white is seen as the blank, empty canvas. Here, white is filling.
The snow engulfs the portrait of a winter pond, imparting its personality to the viewer. The image confronts its audience, in an instance of aggression. It depends on Aristotelian memory, a previous perception of a landscape, and through this hearkening back to a previous knowing of the form magnifies the event that is this landscape.
ReplyDeleteThe trees resemble a Rorshach inkblot, frozen.
Everything is covered in white except the trees. They repel the snow. They rebel against it. This image's affect is a sort of bleak hopelessness punctuated by that blot of trees.
ReplyDeleteWe talked in class today about the power of an image to stand on its own. I had looked at this image last week and had since had computer problems (which is why I'm late to blog), but even though I couldn't see the image, it was still there. It was in my mind and also on the blog. It will forever be on the blog. Does that mean it will forever be powerful?
I love the starkness and stillness of the image. Interestingly, this picture, 'frozen' as it is, a static composition of paint on paper, suggests a lack - of movement, of sound, of change. The image is seemingly 'stamped' in time - the trees, the fence and fenceposts convey a grave and wistful endurance of The Self against a brutal force of nature that actively works to erase any trace of the individual. The predominance of white tones throughout affect a spirit of the inhuman winning out.
ReplyDeleteThe thin, cold and brittle tree stands with confidence and weight amidst the fluid whiteness around. Contrast serves to both highlight the tree amidst the whiteout while at the same time dampening and erasing the borders that distinguish the contours in the snow, the horizon and the sky. In this case the white, airy and light qualities of snow and sky are betrayed by the oppressive weight of the pervasive whiteness. Within the image to conceptions of weightiness and gravity are present. They derive their similar qualities from diverse origins, however they both rely on the same means to them, contrast.
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