Art Analyists

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Heather Dillender Visual Analysis At my visit to the Brooks Museum I saw many wonderful pieces of art. But there was one in particular that caught my eye. It is by Reginald Marsh and the title is Dead Mans Curve. It is showing women running across a street while men in trucks are coming around a curve. The women are scared to death of making it across the street without getting run over while the men seem to be enjoying scaring these women half to death. It is painting of oil on tempera.

Marsh uses implied lines. He made thick black lines on all his figures and objects. He uses his lines to form three-dimensional objects. The women in the picture are all diagonal showing the most energy while the men in the picture are vertical showing power and energy.

The women are the positive shapes since they are the main objects.

The men are the negative shapes sine they are the background. This is called the figure-ground relationship. The shapes used in this painting are organic since he used irregular and curving lines around the faces.

Marsh used pastels in this painting. The women had on blue and pink while the trucks were a light gray. Even the background had pale shading and very little light. The light was coming down on the women from the right side of the painting. The colors that he used were very feminine showing that the women in the pictures were the main objects because if the men were the main objects then the colors would have been darker and manlier. Also the direction of the light makes the women seem like the focal point.

Dead Man's Curve has a visual texture. In this work Marsh makes it look as if the...