I just couldn't help myself

I found a couple of images of Claude Monet's Rouen Cathedral Facade series, and they are just so lovely next to each other in color that I decided to post them on my blog for all to see. When we discussed the time of day that we were to do this assignment (a.m. or p.m.), I immediately thought of Claude Monet because I knew he had painted a series of a cathedral facade at different times of the day. I think it's very interesting that he chose to paint an impression of the cathedral's facade about 12 different times on one day, just to study how the time of day would change the lighting and shadows of the paintings. Here are two of them (I didn't check to see what time of day these two are):

Decisions, decisions...

This video has an interesting viewpoint and treatment of space. Instead of being in the belfry or right up on the castle, the viewer is seeing the castle from a distance, as if standing on the edge of a precipice. The surprise is that the bat, which is the main subject of this video, flies out of the viewer's space and circles around to the castle. The castle is perched on an bow arc-shaped cliff and overlaps three mountains. The bright full moon is the lightest value, followed by the ghostly drifts of fog at the bottom of the foremost part of the picture plane. There is a subtle modulation in value, from unadulterated whites to grayish-blues and bluish-grays to dark blues and finally black. The curved forms also give this composition energy and a fluid sense of movement.

The thing I particularly like about this music video is the lighting and the occasional inclusion of red objects. The black-and-white color scheme appears, in some scenes, almost blurry, and the whitest whites almost cast a glare. The sweat on the DJ's high-resolution features adds to the dramatic mood the videographers were shooting for. The best relationships between positive and negative spaces in the video, however, are in the shots that contain architectural facets, for instance, the stairwells.

This short clip has an interesting perspective and point of view; the angle it is filmed from creates a right diagonal. The crow itself is the darkest value in the picture; however the modulation of the grays, whites, yellows, and greens make up for the lack of dramatic lighting. The relationship between the space in the landscape is fluid in parts, with curved cross diagonals, and a little more crisp in others, hence the fence, the fence pole, the airplane rudder, and the crow's legs. The emphases are placed in the mid ground planes and the vegetation of the foreground planes.

Images of works by Francisco Goya, Albert Bierstadt, Willem Claesz, and Paul Klee