Eliza's Awesome Deconstuction from today's sweatshop:
(Apologies to everyone else in chat, I parsed this out from the logs and added annotations where needed. Eliza made a psd of the composition lines and such she'll put up at some point in the future. More info about the painting is here.)
<Eliza> the great thing about this painting is that it's about all the stations of life for women in the 1800s
<Eliza> it's the "triple goddess" archetype
<Eliza> maiden, mother, crone
<Eliza> on the left there's the new christened baby, in the middle is a young mother leading her little girl in for confirmation maybe
<Eliza> and then on the right there's the nun, who is a sacred virgin, and the grandmother behind her is the crone
<Eliza> note the use of the three white spaces
<Eliza> im not sure iif the person in the shadows is a man or a woman
<Eliza> the only clearly male person i see is the policeman
<Eliza> who is set apart from the proceedings
<Eliza> the victorians had an obsession with male and Female spaces
<Eliza> the house was a female space
<Eliza> and men would go to gentleman's clubs to "escape"
<Eliza> the cool thing about paintings as opposed to photography is that the deconstruction can proceed with the assumption that the painter did everything on purpose or at least did it by hand
<Eliza> rather than by happenstance
<Eliza> the body language of the little girl in the center is really poignant to me
<Eliza> she's pulling against her mother's hand
<Eliza> and this froboding nun with a death crone behind here is welcoming her into this grim interior
<Eliza> and the peasant mother on the right is looking sourly at the rich mother who has only one child instead of two
<Eliza> to me this is a picture about being dragged kicking and screaming into "womanhood" where womanhood is a hideous and threatening construct
<Eliza> that policeman is going to arrest her if she doesn't go inside, maybe
<Eliza> the nun isn't friendly
<Eliza> the poor mother, who has no man with her, hints at ruin and desertion and poverty which happened to women who didn't play by the rules back then
<Eliza> and even the little baby on the left with the two women is not being looked at with hope so much as resignation
--What about the women carrying a shawl on the left?--
<Eliza> no that's a baby in swaddling clothes
<Eliza> he or she was just baptised
<Eliza> victorian babies wore very long, very white, very fancy gowns
<Eliza> it stops babies from punching themselves in the face
<Eliza> babies are stupid
--Who is the little girl in the middle looking at?--
<Eliza> she's looking at the woman with the two babies
--Who is that strange figure in the background on the left?--
<Eliza> well
<Eliza> it looks like maybe an old man
<Eliza> and he seems to be holding a hat
<Eliza> and he's on the church steps so
<Eliza> he might be a beggar
<Eliza> this side of the frame is about poverty
<Eliza> these two ladies are interesting
<Eliza> because i think traditionally everyone went to a baptism and not just the female relatives?
<Eliza> and i think the one of the right may have grey hair pulled back in her bun
<Eliza> indicating she may be the grandmother
<Eliza> i cant tell
<Eliza> people sometimes had kids young so grandmothers often didn't ook too much older
<Eliza> yeah i think it might be lace
<Eliza> i cant tell
<Eliza> this poster is weird
<Eliza> and something we probably don't get because it's likely a reference to current events
---yeah it's a late 19th century paints of paris made in the late 19th century in paris so it was super contemporary---
<Eliza> so
<Eliza> note also the colors in this pic
<Eliza> this particular sky-blue everyone is wearing is typically a color the virgin mary wears
<Eliza> and was chosen carefully
<Eliza> it's interesting that the poor mother is wearing the blue while the rich mother isn't
<Eliza> that might be a comment on the relative "holiness" of the two
<Eliza> a lot of victorian artists were very aware of the plight of women and patriarchal oppression and didn't know what to do about it except write books and paint pictures
<Eliza> which is how Tess of the D'Urbervilles ended up being a really good solid feminist critique
<Eliza> i think the stairs serve to represent the transition into womanhood
<Eliza> they're a physical barrier like the iron fence
<Eliza> what we're doing is tracking the artist through his decisions about this piece
<Eliza> so ok this is important too
<Eliza> a really good way to balance a composition is to put a BIT of a thing on one side and MORE of it on the other
<Eliza> to tense the two things against each other
<Eliza> there's an old art saying that goes "if you want your audience to look at something put red and blue together in that place"
<Eliza> there's a lot of tension in this picture but it's also very calm
<Eliza> ok so check out how the color shapes here[nun and pooer mother, girl in red dress and spot of red on poorer mother, white of the nun's habit and the swaddling clothes]are making us look back and forth between all the important figures
<Eliza> converging on the line of the rich lady's hat
<Eliza> reminder that a recent psychological therapy tecnique is to force eye movement in a patient while thinking about traumatic events, it's a form of programming
<Eliza> EMDR
<Eliza> good results apparently
[traingle of pink between flowers in hair on far left, poor woman's baby, and rich woman's dress]
<Eliza> heres' a secondary set of shapes
<Eliza> pink isn't as strong a color so we dont look at it first
<Eliza> but in our second or fourth pass we'll see it
<Eliza> there are some mysteries in this painting i'm not sure anyone can answer except the artist
<Eliza> why put that little girl in red? maybe to draw attention to the cop or the nun or both
<Eliza> what's the poster on the left about
<Eliza> probably just something to make the painting work better
<Eliza> what happens when we get rid of the poster i wonder
[clone tool over poster]
<Eliza> yeah that's less interesting
<Eliza> not sure why
<Eliza> i mean sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
<Eliza> this poster on the left
<Eliza> is just there to be a splotch where there needed to be a splotch
<Eliza> it's painted very roughly
<Eliza> yeah
<Eliza> looks more like a street
<Eliza> in conclusion, smash the patriarchy