The joy of life - Essay Example

The characters in the painting vary from one to the other; the three characters on the foreground were painted using napels yellow-reddish extra colour. There are two obviously female characters in the middle ground, one with a reddish hair and the other a brunette they have a pale skin. On the left side of the paint, there are four characters, one with a yellow skin and the three have an emerald green skin tone. The painting is an elaborate yet brilliant use of an array of different aspects of art, and an intricate application of shadowing; this has the effect of dramatizing the characters in this piece of art.

Matisse (1869-1954) is a celebrated and respected artist from Paris who initially began a career in law but eventually transited to art, where he started as an amateur artist and later studied academic painting from various artists in Paris, Australia and London. He also experimented on sculpting, using clay to create certain forms, and printmaking but his most notable contributions are well known in the art works. Most of his paintings exhibit the character of extravagant and use of bold, bright and vibrant colors, and for this, he was known as “wild beast”.

His bold usage of brilliant colours earned him a place in the list of greatest modern artist of the 20th century. His initial paintings, now mostly in St Petersburg Russia, were mostly inclined to innate subject matter, but his later work bore the inclination of impressionalism. He admired and adored several artists and these included Jean- Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and he made copies of Chardin’s work. Henri Matisse applied several varied aspects of art in the painting ‘Joy of Life’ to put his message across.

One of the most important elements that he applied is the careful use of space, which becomes very evident to the viewer at first glance. He was able to accomplish this through by the different sizes and distances between the subjects in the whole work as some of the sizes seem entirely inconsistent generating marvelous scene to the viewer as to just how near or far the subjects are in relation to one another. The artist also applies color with creativity by using a very wide range of colors from extremely light to pastel purple with a thin outline of dark blue lines, to deep red landscape, which is in contrast with the pale yellow skin of a woman’s body to create an eye-catching impact on the viewer.

Another outstanding element of Matisse’s artwork was the use of line in the whole paining of ‘Joy of Life’ to carefully outline the subjects that are lighter in tone, and to portray a general flow of the painting. The use of smooth, consistent lines in this piece conveyed the creativity of the artist, which greatly influenced the work and was adequately able to capture the exact effect that Matisse intended to show us. Matisse developed this painting out of the impressionists’ movement that was prevalent in the late 19th century, a derogatory term coined by Louis Leroy in 1972 to refer to a work of art that is unfinished.

Matisse’s painting had no sphere or boundary on rules, the painting purely reflected radicalism in light of the growing secularism at that time in France. French political system at that time had an impact on the painting, during that period, French political system was adapting to the secular society, this had an impact on