ARTS 150: Approaches – Final Paper. The woman behind Screen Door

The woman behind Screen Door
Name
Institutional Affiliation
The "Woman behind Screen Door, Independence, California" is an artwork created by Ansel Adams, an American in 1944. It is a contemporary artwork produced after the Great Depression that occurred in 1929 and ended in the late 1930s. The piece of art is currently found at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, and it is 38.1x49.5 cm in size. Adams created the art using gelatin silver print often used on paper to produce images. Adam's works involved black and white colors in his imaging, often portraying the American West. He was a phenomenal individual who was both an environmentalist and a landscape photographer, often advocating for pure photography. Thus, his artwork was more of photography than drawing, painting, and sketching. As a conservationist, his works played a significant role in urging the public to conserve the wildered areas. His technique facilitated the development of photography in the fine arts field. In "Woman behind Closed Door," Adam uses light medium and high contrast to emphasize significant areas such as the woman's face while evoking reaction among the audience concerning the subject's state of wellbeing.
Formal Analysis
In the artwork, the woman is placed at the center of the piece, obtaining the audience's entire focus. The background is black with nothing in its space. The woman's face reveals a tired or somewhat fragile individual considering that her face is wrinkled. The artist uses thin lines on her forehead while her eye bags are saggy, exposing her skin's bold lines. The lady's polka-dotted blouse creates a difference in the woman's face, background, and clothing. On her ring finger, the lady has a golden ring as she leans on a wooden board. Because the piece is a photograph, the artist used gelatin silver print to focus light on her body's visible parts while keeping her clothing and the background dark, meaning that the latter is of less importance. This technique uses paper to create monochromatic images based on the sensitivity of light in the silver. When it was placed on light, the silver is more sensitive on the less dark parts, creating the woman's contrasted image. This was a highly technologized innovation that contemporary times have implemented to produce quality pictures with precise focusing and sharpness.
Art Movements
The artwork represents the Impressionism art movement of the 19th Century. This is a movement associated with mostly French artists who made efforts to accurately record visual impressions by emphasizing the changing qualities of light. Modern photography is based on this fact because they seek to enhance the picture's quality by emphasizing light sensitivity, a significant property of light useful in arts. Impressionism can be characterized by thin yet visible strokes while emphasizing the depiction of light to produce the pictures' unusually visual angles. From the art, the woman's face and condition allow the audience to create an opinion based on her looks, which is a similar idea in impressionism, which sought to enable people to form their opinions and mental pictures of the artwork produced using its techniques. Since the painting is a contemporary piece of art, it reflected on the political iss...