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Vacation

Anthony Shea allows us to imagine ourselves on vacation, taking a walk along the beach and stopping to appreciate the warmth atmosphere. He allows this mood to be felt by painting this naturalistic oil on canvas art work. The artist does well in recording how forms are shown by light and shadow and how the body shows the structure of muscle by the neck area.
In the painting Shea focuses on the sharply defined figures that the sun creates as it hits an object. He depicts them through sudden shifts in value – dark blue to light blue, dark green to yellow green and tan to black. The shifts in color value in the artwork allow us to see where the ocean is deep versus where it is shallow. Shea uses very few colors in the painting with the primarily being blue, green and black. He uses the attribute of straight lines; the horizontal line of the horizon and the diagonal line of the water meeting the shore; to give the viewer a better view of where the boundaries are.
The artist seems to be using implied lines of sight to create a focal point on the young lady seated in the sand. This is shown by the direction the guy’s head is turn, where he positions the lady in the middle of the screen and how the artist uses as little detail as possible in the background.
From the work we get a sense of feeling that it was sometime during the day because of the sun but also gives us a feeling that it may have been early fall because of the slight brown leaves and the fallen coconuts from the trees in the diagram.
The size of the series of coconut trees helps the viewer to understand the deepness of the picture because the closer the tree is to you the bigger it looks but as it moves further away it decreases in size. This scaling is also depicted with the two humans being that the gentleman seems slightly larger than the lady not because of how society depicts them but because of where they are positioned.
After analyzing the artwork I won’t say that the picture has a...