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Untitled
In the painting,
“The Scream” by Edvard Munch many different themes coincide within the
painting’s array of color. I
could stare at this painting for hours and never truly understand it. Many
bad qualities are displayed. This
sadness is conveyed through the colors the artist . I saw how a painting
as unrealistic as this could express such a rush of pure emotion. I think
the work expresses the loneliness and awful despair felt by Munch, on
realization of the natural world in comparison to a single human being. He
is tortured by man's insignificance and haunted by his fettered state of
mind. His wavy strokes of paint echo the hollow mouth of the figure,
creating an ominous shadow of the stream and the hellish streaks of sky
from above. The colors are menacing and evocative, creating an air of
expectancy in the background. Munch's body has become distorted along with
the flow of the river and the skies. This is a painting about madness and
despair and the collapse of one's universe and sanity. This shows all of
his emotions flying out. Also the colours are bright, mostly reds and
oranges, both of which are colours associated with pain and anguish.
Indeed, this is a painting that could only be produced by someone who knew
madness and was probably mad himself. The painting showed a hairless,
oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in
horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. Twisted
ripples of the creature's torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the
air surrounding it. The creature covered its ears against its own sound.
The creature stood on a bridge and no one else was present as the creature
screamed in isolation. What strikes me about this painting is the
normality of everything else besides the man screaming. It's a sort of
inner scream we all feel sometimes when an agony that we must keep silent
about comes to a head. Unless we are insane, we keep the resulting desire
to scream in despair and fear inside. We are torn apart inside while
outside everything goes on as normal. This painting captures both the
inner scream and the normality around us as nothing I have seen before. It
is certainly a candid comment on life and on being human. Look at the
rapid swirling motion of the landscape, and the wild colors Munch has
used. There is so much action going on in this painting, and then amongst
all the chaos, standing in the center of the piece is our subject; simply
depicted, no extreme facial features, standing, screaming.
The scream",
portrayed anxiety, fear and despair, not only in the shrieking figure, but
also the tormented sky. Munch describes an experience which brought him to
paint this master piece: As Munch once explained about the painting, "I
was walking on a street with two friends, when the sun appeared suddenly,
the sky changed to red like blood. I stopped, leaned on a wall to rest,
from an unexplainable exhaustion. Fire tongues and blood spread on fiord
blackish-blue. My friends kept on walking, while I was left behind,
trembling with fear and I felt an enormous scream, infinity, of nature.”
The style of the
painting is wavy as if in a dreamlike state, and there is someone
approaching in the background dressed all in black. Maybe Munch thought
that Death was approaching him. I know of no other picture that has such
an authentic way of expressing so directly the phenomenon of fear as an
existential human condition. What we see in this painting is not merely a
picture of a landscape, but rather a state of mind that is both curious
and disturbing. A crimson sky looms above the dark, sinuous figure on the
pier. Clasping his hands to his face, he stares out of the painting with a
look of terror and almost a plea for help.
It is indeed a
curious piece. The sky is not really that of a sunset, but more of the
blood red Munch described. The yellow, a horrid mustard, counteracts the
red causing the sky to look more like it is burning than setting. The land
becomes this watery blue where we expect brown.
Overall,
the painting makes for a psychologically disturbing sight. We recognise
the position the figure is in. It is a position we often see people in
asylums in. We feel disturbed through the distorted landscape and tension
when we cross over to the straightness of the bridge. The painting in its
composition, colour, and brush marks creates the emotion Munch hoped to
achieve, complete despair. But yet all the colors and lines form together
to make the painting look like a fictional place. Maybe this is why some
people say most artists are crazy.
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