Rat People

People First, Rats Second
Five indistinguishable figures stand in the arid, earth toned desert, draped under a single distinct tarp created from clearly improvised materials. This makeshift roof provides shade, but not shelter, from the wasteland that these assumed rodents are found in, and in the field of the red and brown earthly hues rich with clay, the landscape is broken only by stark instances of darkness conflicting with the individual, ivory tarp that contributes the bulk of the framed works’ detail. These primal entities keep a lone sophisticated device with them amongst their ruins and lack of shelter, a method of light transportation; a motorcycle. Questions immediately arise in an observer’s mind, such as the identity of the shaded …show more content…
Entitled ‘Rat People’, George Calvert’s painting sets out to distinguish the inaccuracies of transition found in people’s lives utilizing a vapid and dry color pallette, powerful juxtapositions and intentional ambiguity; once these inaccuracies in transition are identified, Calvert questions fundamental ethical standards and beliefs of the seemingly lower-class with a combination of emotional, authoritative, and sympathetic methods of appeal. Grimy, unwashed colors populate the entirety of this sixteen by twenty inch canvas, seemingly endless until disrupted by pure blacks and bright whites. These red and brown tones, bleak and devoid of life, frame the desolate environment, sparsely populated by only a handful of individual birds and a small group of human figures, identified by the shadows that their lone and pure tarp casts on the field of earthly tones. Rat People’s creator uses this bleak color palette to bring emphasis to the dreary position these individuals are framed in, portraying a landscape as barren and lifeless as the human’s own existences. However, faint …show more content…
The artist employs this vagueness in order to stress the generalization of the seemingly lower class; recognizing that the Rat People of a community are as human as the most noble and aristocratic members of the same society, also making the apparent savages’ human qualities nearly indistinguishable and easily overlooked; a common characteristic of others’ perspective of the lower class. This same obscurity is also employed as an appeal to the audience; the vague and indistinguishable nature of the figures creates a veil of ignorance that causes the viewer to question the identity of the humans, implying that these five supposed rodents identity could belong to anyone, including the viewer themselves. This relatability compels a wide variety of onlookers to compare the profound situation framed in Rat People to their own lives and also emphasizes the temporary and mislabeling nature of the lower class. Calvert argues figuratively and literally through the use of ambiguous figures that humans denoted as rodents are not defined by the situation that they are found in, and that society focuses on the environment that these groups find themselves in instead of the people themselves, a mistake as grave as the landscape