Last weekend, we visited the Winnipeg Art Gallery as part of Nuit Blanche. It was a fun evening and so nice to see all of the different art – but as we were wandering the galleries, I found myself – as I so often do when looking at art – dismissing the Renaissance section at first glance.
Art is a form of rhetoric. It can be extremely captivating and you can decipher so many different meanings from it. And analyzing and critiquing art can be a fantastic experience!
So why is it that Renaissance artwork leaves me with such disinterest?
Something I found very interesting, when wandering the Renaissance gallery, was how similar all of the faces looked in the paintings. The expressions were all nearly identical. The face of a baby looked the same as a young woman which looked the same as an old man: if all you saw was the facial features of a Renaissance painting, you would have no idea who or what was being portrayed.
The colours of Renaissance artwork are also vivid in an almost comic book way, as Mr Science observed. There’s a strange cartoony quality in many of the pieces, and an underlying ugliness* seems to be one of the key features of the Renaissance.
Moving into the galleries featuring Dutch windmills and landscapes from the 1800s, and the more recent abstract artwork featuring bright colours and defined lines and blending strokes, I couldn’t help but notice how much more these paintings appealed to me. And it wasn’t necessarily because the landscapes and abstract paintings were “softer” or “prettier.” I think what I preferred about them was that, although some were certainly similar, there were many that were vastly different. The colours, the styles, the lines and shapes, all of these were different. When it comes to Renaissance artwork, much of it just seems so much of the same to me. And that gets dull very quickly.
What do you think? Is one Renaissance piece much like another? Do you enjoy abstract art? Share in the comments section below!
*Beauty is of course in the eye of the beholder – it is simply my opinion that the starkness of Renaissance art has an ugliness to it.
Straight up, works of the Renaissance strike me like classical music. My crude upbringing perhaps, but I’ll take a jug of Boone’s Farm, some Marshall Tucker Band, and pictures with bears on ’em.
I find art in how I live, not on the walls. I’m a simpleton, for sure…
“I find art in how I live, not on the walls” – I like that!