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September 30, 2005
Alfred Leslie's Painting
The semantic meaning that I come up with after looking at this painting for a couple of minutes is that we live in a world where people are trying to control nature by technology. Slowly, but surely, technology is taking over our lives and becoming the most important aspect of our being.
The syntactic elements of the painting that lead me to think of this message are the lines and colors painted. I make meaning out of the square in the middle of the canvas. To me it is not just a square, but a television. The various other shapes painted within the square are merely more squares, rectangles, and circles, but I do not see just those shapes. Instead I see a screen, control panels, and knobs. The white paint in the top right corner of the screen has a familiar shape and color. I connotate this to be the moon. The other shades of color present in the screen are those viewed when the sun rises or sets, therefore I associate them with the sun.
These syntactic elements are what leave me with the impression that this painting is about society trying to control or "tune" nature as one would tune the picture on a television screen.
I think that the television set is a form of metonymy in that it is merely a part of technology, but is used to represent technology as a whole in this painting.
Posted by lcissullivan at September 30, 2005 02:18 PM