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Ying Li Painting Description (Petra, Grace B, Sam)

petra's picture

Red Rock Point #6

Standing at a distance, the painting looks like it is divided diagonally into two halves: the upper-left half seems to be a depiction of the ocean, and the bottom right half seems to be a rocky dark coast covered in tidepools and other life. The ocean portion consists mostly of different shades of blue and white, with a large white area in the bottom left corner, suggesting that a large wave is crashing against the coast there. There is a small orange line in the upper left quadrant, standing out from the blue of the water. The texture of of the ocean part of the painting looks more fluid than the dark land area of the painting. In the land part there are many areas where it looks like the artist took a tube of paint and squeezed it onto the painting without manipulating it in any way afterward, for example in the bottom center. The texture of the painting as a whole is very thick and shiny-- as if the artist put layer upon layer of paint onto the canvas. The land that covers the bottom right half is mostly black, brown, and grey, with significant amounts of color mixed in, including teal, green, orange, and yellow. These colors look like they may represent the life living in tidepools and the algae, lichen, and moss growing along the coast. It doesn’t look like it’d be easy to walk along this coastline without stepping on something alive or slipping into the crashing waves of the ocean.