Tuan Tran - The Ark

     On the Friday day morning of 10-26-07, I got a chance to visit the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, which is located at 3200 Darnell St. There, I scanned through many sculptures, art setups, drawings, and paintings. But only one piece really caught my eye, which made me took time to analyze it and write about it for this assignment. The piece was called “The Ark”, by Melissa Miller, painted in 1951. I would have probably figure out the name of the piece myself because of how the painting looked. It was mainly a large group of animals migrating towards one direction. Furthermore, the piece did not really emphasize shape, all though every animal was well proportioned with each other as how they would be in reality. All the figures in the painting seemed to jump out at you, especially when the artist did not add any animals in the foreground. For space, the painter overlapped most of the animals, creating a lot of activities amongst the animals. One thing that really stood out in the painting was the lighting. The setting of the piece was when it was about to have a big storm, so shadows was heavily used. The atmosphere of the painting had a dark and kind of chilly feeling because the use of dark colors to emphasize the big storm. The figures were painted with great detail, this resulted in the painting having a rough texture with all the layers upon layers of paint that was added. Balance in the painting was pretty simple by the use of a “house-like” symmetry. The very middle top portion of the painting was the highest point, and middle left and right sides where the lowest points. Though there was balance and symmetry, there was a lot of activity in the piece. Therefore, the viewer’s eyes will not find a particular place to rest their eyes on, especially with a large painting like this one. The viewer’s eyes will tend to start to move from the left and gradually move up and down the piece, while slowly moving towards the right. The pattern of how the viewer’s eyes may move would probably be similar to a musician reading their notes. This massive two-dimensional painting probably took a lot of patience to create, mostly because of the size of the painting. The dimensions would be somewhere around 20 feet long and 7 feet tall. I’m sure the reason why she had such a large painting was to fit all the variety of animals into the painting, and she would have extended the size even more if she could. Obviously, Miller painted this piece to remind us of the days before the world ended. I think this is a great piece to show off, especially to Catholics such as myself. Miller did a really good job of incorporating a lot of characteristics into this piece to make a painting a great painting. Such characteristics as balance, shadows, and detail were the main ones.