Blog Post #3

I decided to go with Maxime Maufra's "Back to Fishing Boats in Belle-Isle-En-Mer", a 2D oil painting made in 1910. It is a Post-Impressionist work depicting a landscape, or, more specifically, a seascape. It is done in a representational style. We can see ships floating atop the ocean waves with a lighthouse to the left, which is standing on what appears to be an isle of some sort.
I really enjoy the colors used in this painting. It mostly uses varying shades of two primary colors: blue and red. There are various shades of blue used here; the sky, for instance, is painted using sky blue while the ocean is more of a deep oxford blue with hints of dark green, which gives the water a sense of depth. We can see white and some very light blues in the crests (the light tips) of the waves too, which might allow us to assume that the scene portrayed in the painting took place during a windy day. The sky also holds some baby pink mixed in to give the effect of clouds. The boats have really bright, orange-red sails; orange being complementary to blue, and red to green, the latter of each being represented in the colors of the sea. The lighthouse itself is painted a snowy white with some baby blue accents. The red in the lighthouse is not so much orange-red but more of a brick red; and lastly the isle seems to be a cedar-ish brown. Between the blues and reds, there is definitely mixed feelings between warm and cool in this painting.
Aside from the colors used, this painting has numerous visual elements at play, one being its use of lines. Particularly, the lines used in creating the sea. There's a mix of horizontal and diagonal lines, many perpendicular to each other, and some that are not straight, which gives us an understanding of the movement of the waves. Even the body of the ship in the center is basically a diagonal line amidst all these other kinds of lines. We can definitely see the action occurring in this scene since there are many different types of lines and none of them are all that parallel to each other.
The use of value is also very prevalent in this painting as there is a big contrast between light and dark. The sky is made using much lighter colors, but once we get past the horizon line, we get extremely dark blues and greens. However, even the sky and ocean have their own separate value ranges. With the sky, the right portion of it is slightly darker than the left, and despite the sea being mostly quite dark, we can also see some lighter parts of it in which light is being reflected off the surface.
The shapes used in this painting are both organic and geometric. For example, for geometric shapes, we see that the sail of the main boat heavily resembles a triangle, and the body of the lighthouse looks like it could be a perfect cylinder or even rectangle. The isle seems like it could be a rectangle too. When looking at the entire object however, the boat and lighthouse are very much organic shapes. It's only some details of them that can be seen as geometric shapes.
 And lastly, there's the use of positive and negative space. We can consider the ship, lighthouse and isle to be the positive space, as they are the focus of this painting. As for negative space, that would be the empty area in the sky and surrounding the boat.