Joan Miro and Dutch Interior Essay

Joan Miro created a surrealist painting, a style that expresses the subconscious using imagery in the subject matter, Dutch Interior shows a man playing the guitar at a table. There are animals and a women sitting around him listening to the beautiful sound. Miro used a wide array of colors especially green and white to emphasize a happy day. He uses complementary colors to allow the colors to clash and have things stand out and be unified from the rest of the canvas. Joan Miro created this painting by observing another painting called The Lute Player. He painted, distorted, simplified and abstracted it by drawing only what he thought was important of the object and using the colors he thought best represented the figure. Miro feels that it is not important to show every little detail because doing that gives your imagination no room to imagine. To him abstracting his images is the best way for him to express his inner feelings. In this painting the Dutch Interior he feels the most i mportant thing is the fact that a man is playing a guitar and so he paints that. He does not think the painting was painted to show the mans velvet hat so he leaves that out. Miro puts a happy warm feeling into his work by painting soft but brilliant colors onto his canvas. He puts soft whites into his painting to emphasize that warm mood of joy. Miro uses the color white also to show important areas of the canvas. Miro also uses some principles of design to try to give this feeling. He uses movement to lead your eye around starting from the man playing the guitar and ending in the lower left hand corner at the place where the dog is sitting. The central focus is the man playing the guitar because he is what the whole painting is basically about. One other important principle of design he uses is asymmetrical balance. There are the same amount of things happening on both sides of the musician. On the left you have a dog starring up at him and listening to the comforting music while on the right side the cat is doing the same thing. Although the central focus is the musician things are happening through out the canvas. Such as out the window there are people sailing boats and inside there are many different animals listening. I get the feeling of a happy day and all is going well and there is nice soft music in the background. The day is calm and nothing can go wrong, everything is just perfect. This painting was painted for the one reason to make people warm and happy inside and to tell people every where that detail is not needed in a painting as long as you have your imagination leading you through it. Miro wants to tell you that there is more to art than recognizable subject matter. You don’t have to know what your looking at.