Compare and Contrast

The original piece titled "Dance" by Henri Matisse

Here you see Matisse used oil on canvas, depicting nude individuals dancing on what I presume to be a hill or mountain top of some sort. His use of lines showing you that the figures are moving and not still. 

Here is my rendition of the piece.

As I stated in my previous post the green and blue merging together signify they are stronger at the mergence. What I have come to call "organs" are the new stand in for the nude figures. I wanted to keep them somewhat pale, and have the red darker in the "tentacles". For me that just show where the activity beneath is occurring the most.

Where they are both different, I still used the same primary colors, and five unique but intertwined appendages. In my piece there is a more fluid movement, while in the original piece the movement is raw, and flawed.

Completion

Here I present my final completed piece for my interpretation of "Dance" by Henri Matisse.

I used colored pencil, keeping the same primary color's that Matisse used in his piece. Instead of people dancing, I re-imagined it as 5 inanimate objects flowing together in the blue and green. As the two colors meet they become darker, signifying that this is where they are strongest.

Prepro and Work In Progress

I have begun working on the change up of this piece titled "Dance" to kind of give it more movement and less rigidity.

The top prepro shows the flowing movement I wanted from this piece, as labeled I keep the coloring the same. The second prepro is still showing movement but with less freedom. I really enjoyed using flowy sketches on this assignment. The third prepro is opposite of what I wanted to accomplish but I just had to try out a minimalist piece.

These two pictures are my attempt at using my Wacom for a digital rendition of my first prepro, which I decided to go with for my assignment.

I ultimately decided to stay traditional for my final, as you'll see in this rough draft for my Final piece.

Objective Critique

The piece titled "Dance" by Henri Matisse is a wonderful painting in the grand scheme of things, and uses primitive concepts to convey a ritualistic scene. I don't mean ritualistic as in satanic, just in that the individuals are going about an act carried down through their lineage. 

This painting was a sister painting to "Music" also by Matisse, and hung together in the estate of Sergei Shchukin, who was a Russian businessmen and art collector, until the October Revolution of 1917. 

It shows 5 red figures dancing, against the simple green landscape under a deep blue sky. It is supposed to symbolize feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.

Subjective Critique

My initial reaction upon seeing "Dance" for the first time was that it was lacking in something. I couldn't quite figure it out yet but I knew it was missing something that would inspire me. 

The main reasons why this piece doesn't inspire me is that it attempts to convey movement but not well enough for my liking. The colors are dark and forboding, and scream a negative energy. The last reason is that the bodies look too much like a cartoon imitating life, instead of being realistic.

I want to change this by using the base colors to convey wild movement across the page. I will attempt this by breaking down the barriers/lines and letting the colors move freely instead of being constricted to certain areas.

Original Image

"Dance"
Henri Matisse
Oil on Canvas
1909