02/07/13

Session 2.2

The 20th century Dutch artist Mondrian painted Woods Near Oele in 1908 and The Composition in Red, Blue and Yellow in 1922. In the Woods Near Oele, he uses the elements of color, line and shape. A lot of the colors he uses are bold and dark. The colors are vivid and obvious. I noticed that he uses a lot of darker colors with complementary lighter shades next to them. The trees are the darkest. In between the dark trees is a light shade of blue which really gives focus to how dark the features of the trees are. This usage of primary and complimentary colors really does show that this is his early art experience where he was experimenting. The brightest color used is what looks like the sun on the top right of the image. Lines are used to portray the standing position of the trees. Most of the trees are lined directly up except for a couple slanted ones near the sun. As far as shapes, he uses a lot of rectangles and squares, although not always perfectly shaped. He also uses the principles of design of balance and emphasis. The balance in the image is shown from the positioning of everything in the image such as the trees being vertically aligned. The water is horizontally aligned. Nothing in the image seems out of place. He really emphasizes color in the image. The water alone has at least four different shades of color. He greatly emphasizes complementary colors especially dark and light ones.

He also uses the elements of color, line and shape in The Composition in Red, Blue and Yellow image. He also emphasizes color in this image, but in a very different way than 1908. It really seems like further in his career, he took out a lot of information and meaning from his art work. In the Woods Near Oele, he uses several dark and lighter shades. Here however, he merely uses a dark red, dark blue, white, black and a small bit of light yellow. He uses line and shape in a more strict way than his early works. The whole image looks like it is mainly about lines and shapes; perfect squares and rectangles of different sizes. He uses balance in this image by aligning everything perfectly.