Traci Newberry's Museum Visit

Alexandre Hogue painted Drouth Stricken Area in 1934 in America with oil on canvas.

 His intriguing use of line creates a simple view of drout and depression, but upon closer examination, the simplicity is surpassed by it detail. The lines of the painting seem to outline most figures, but enhance the idea of depravity by making the scene seem even deplete of expected texture. The lines of the windmill draw you eye upward, while the buzzard takes your eyes to the starving cow in a very triangular shape.

The figures are bold and grotesque. They are brilliantly outlined and slightly geometric. Most everything in the painting is placed in the foreground, perhaps to allude that the future may have something less dismal in store. The painting is two dimensional, but is created in a way to imply depth and volume. Houge uses overlapping, atmospheric perspective, and linear perspective in order to create depth.

The light from the sun is implied and not seen, but only cast by the subjects in the painting. Shadows are long, and depicted as if the sun was about to start setting; perhaps rising. The shadows placed in the work create another layer of drama, to add to the dramatic color and value changes. Hogue chose to pick in almost only two colors, different tones of blues and oranges. These are analogous colors, but the shades he chose, disguise the contrast. In turn, the painting appears warm and cold at the same time. Warm from the sun and the barren desert; cold from the hopelessness and starvation.

The actual texture of this painting was fairly smooth, and flat. However, Hogue implies texture in the sand, fence, and animals he painted. The sand's texture created by parallel lines, the cow by shadows and dramatic lines, and the fence with a constant pattern and line.

Drouth Stricken Area has a triangle shaped balance. The cow and the vulture are the bottom two points, with the top of the windmill at the peak. There is also a good bit of alternating shades and tints creating a feeling of static. I feel that even though the cow was not placed in center, there is a good amount of evidence placed on it due to the amount of detail and contrast it contains. The painting as a whole does not have one consistent rhythm, but contains many rhythms in order to create texture in the sand, in the windmill and in the fence. Drouth Stricken Area was painted in Oils on Canvas, and enabled the painter to create areas of very smooth color and contrast, placed next to bold lines and detail. The paining, I'm sure, no longer looks quite the same as when originally painted, but very close due to the proficiency of preservation techniques. All in all, this painting spoke to me, because in such simply ways, it was able to convey such disparity.