Perceiving and Critiquing: Jansen and Waters

Perceiving and Critiquing: Jansen and Waters

My initial reaction to the piece entitled, The Workers by Marcus Antonius Jansen, I found to be quite frank, "Busy." It was very difficult to focus on one aspect without being drawn to another. As I read the caption, I found my initial response befitting.

The painting depicts minorities at work for Ford Motor Company--a company I once worked for building databases; and 'busy' was an understatement. The paintings use of bluish-silver tones evoked the feeling of 'imprisonment,' the colors radiate an eerie coldness, darkness, and an air of abandonment. During negotiations at Ford's--naturally a very stressful time, and I shared with family and friends of how on edge and aloof the staff had become--literally using the aforementioned words to describe the atmosphere.

From my perspective, The Workers depicts the employees as 'slaves,' again, as I perceive the painting. Take the elderly woman seated downstage, right, she looks like a sharecropper in dress and appearance, there are several others sharing this same image. Perhaps that is what Jansen was going for, to relay the comparisons of sharecropping then and now. If this were not his intent, then I would have involved more colors, perhaps showed employees laughing and helping one another, more of an engaging scene--understandably working in factory does in no part cause one to picture tall trees and blue skies, however the multiple scenes atop of more scenes I would omit, it gives the impression of 'no way out' that everywhere one looks, there's more "factory," more glum, more depression--perhaps this too was his vision to share the "magnitude" of actually working in such an environment, perhaps all of these where his true vision, I'll take it one step further, perhaps his 'own' experiences...therefore and if so, I would not change a thing.

Lisa Marie Waters, artist...I literally gasped in "Awe", of New York Woods. The combination of colors--the soft reds, oranges, browns, yellows and greens--lots of green actually made me hungry for jelly beans, as they were clustered together. The scene is simply beautiful, I sat staring for several minutes envisioning walking down that masterfully painted pathway on my way to sit in front of a babbling brook, to listen to Mozart while eating jelly beans, foolish I know, but that is what I did. Perhaps Waters had that as her mission, to draw the viewer into her world--to cause one to become lost...if this were her intentions, it surely worked--well, at least for me it did and because I became so engulfed in the painting, there is nothing I would change, short of painting myself into the scene.

About the Artists...

M. Jansen:

Marcus Antonius Jansen discovered his gift for the arts during treatment sessions utilizing art therapy after being diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder following his 1991 army tour, "He has been redefining urban landscape painting..." ever