This is my first post regarding the Bridge 1 Project for Studio/Seminar. We were instructed to choose a painting from the MET for this project and the painting I chose was Vernet’s A Shipwreck on Stormy Seas.
Room Shots
10 Preliminary Drawings
These are drawings of various areas in the painting, I mostly focused on objects that were living or moving, such as the people or the ships.
Thesis
It is not memory that should be used to define a person, but rather the actions that people take in the present that determine people’s characters, while memory and place are used to give people experience to make their choices in certain situations.
Paragraph
I chose the oil on canvas painting called “A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas” by a French painter named Joseph Vernet from Avignon in Paris, it was made in 1773, . I chose this painting because I found the imagery to be incredible, especially with the level of detail and the amount of characters in the painting to choose from. For example, not only do you see the actual shipwreck, but you see a series of people who are struggling to withstand the storm. I just found that to be fascinating. In addition, the two ships are painted with extreme detail and the lighting and shading just seems to be chaotic. Because of how the piece simply looks and how much is going on, I chose this piece and I find it possible to write about something based on at least one of the characters presented in the painting.
Beginning postcard drafts
My idea for the postcards are to have a passenger about to board the ship write to someone who he/she cares about. It’s quite simple, however, I could come up with some interesting ideas. I related the postcards to the idea of memory and my thesis because the person on the ship’s destination is their original hometown, however, by the end of the journey, once he arrives, the hometown is far different from what he remembers, which is how I will relate the story to memory.
