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The Reaper

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Another one for our art appreciation class! Wherein we had to make a "mock-up" art exhibit following a theme. We went with "Balance of Life" and I decided to experiment a bit with surrealism and something that isn't too detailed or intricate, and leaving up the interpretation to the viewer despite having my own, so I'll simply give a brief description of the piece and the theming.


A farmer stands in an endless corridor of fields, harvesting, reaping, and looking into the distance to find another being in the distance, barely making out the mysterious figure to be another reaper. Not truly knowing for certain what or who it is, but continuing to move forward in this life of reaping and sowing through the plain, empty fields.


Making this piece was terribly timed with those trending AI generated images of geometric photos :L and I just want to clarify that this piece was not made using it. I love my craft and I would never betray my fellow creatives. Keep creating and keep painting.

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I know nothing about art, and maybe im overthinking the initial feelings I had about this artwork, but I wanted to share what I think I felt from it.

My interpretation of this was that its the perspective of someone who thought they knew something and/or where it is (the thing off in the distance), only to have their perception of that thing caught to be wrong. Another commenter said that this looks like vertigo, and I agree, but to me the recurring landscapes receding into the distance make it look more specifically like shock and disconnect, and as though the object was displaced to an artificial distance. This could be by the sight of the reaper, but the fact that the focus remains on the distant object without much detail being given to the reaper made me feel that their being together may have been tangential rather than either one causing the other's appearance (i.e., both the object and the reaper appear hazily, neither seeming any more real and therefore causal than the other). The fact that the reaper's shadow lingers across each repeated landscape might otherwise suggest that he's somewhat real, for if the landscape repeats in the viewer's eyes, why wouldn't the stuff seen in it also repeat? Yet the reaper himself does not repeat, making me feel like it is only his accidental qualities, rather than his being, that is in any way real, at least from the perspective of the viewer. In this way, the reaper's presence seems to represent an inversion of the viewer's reality, and along with the artificially distant object of focus and my interpreting the recurring landscape as a kind of sudden dissociation or involuntary distancing of one's own mind from reality, this inversion could, in whole, be symbolism for the experience of dissociation. The reaper might not be someone else staring at the viewer, then, but instead might be the viewer themself staring into the distant object from their own dissociated perspective, whether this be metaphorical (i.e. they simply do not feel like themself) or literal.

I guess that the object, despite being just a black blob, could feel so important in this artwork to me just because it seems to be something unknown that one nonetheless wants. Maybe the idea of one's longing for something that they realize is so far beyond them so as to cause them some kind of paralysis speaks to me in some way.

At first I also thought that the viewer's dissociative state could have been triggered by them misremembering what/where the object is, but on second thought the fact that they're standing in an open field and surrounded by fog could have been off-putting by itself. Then again, maybe that's thinking too literally, this is supposed to be surreal haha!
Thank you for giving me this experience! :D

Love this. It gives a weird sense of vertigo.

amazing paint!

very beautiful piece you've blessed us with, the bright colors and the cool glitch effect really give it a sense of depth, brushwork clean asf too. im hyped for what you cook up next

me sowing vs me reaping

Credits & Info

Views
437
Faves:
74
Votes
139
Score
4.71 / 5.00

Uploaded
Jan 9, 2024
6:57 AM EST
Category
Fine Art

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