How Did Dennis Blagg Painted Passover Red

Normally, a painted desert scene and a horse sculpture don’t have very many things in common, if at all. In Passover, Dennis Blagg has created a stunning and realistic painting. In contrast, Hina, sculpted by Deborah Butterfield is an extraordinary sculpture of a resting horse. While the pieces are different art forms, they both convey the beauty of organic forms in nature. Dennis Blagg is an extremely talented artist in the Southwest area, particularly the Big Bend National Park region of West Texas. In 1997, Blagg painted Passover, a beautiful representational desert scene with enormous mountains in the background. In the left hand side of the painting there is a dramatic difference in colors. In the upper corner, the cloudless sky is a cool blue. About half way down, there is a rigid mountain arising out of the rocky desert ground which appears as a neutral, sandy brown. As the viewer’s eyes move below the mountain they will notice some healthy vegetation seemingly out of place with the surrounding rocks and dirt. Now shift to the upper middle of the painting. The sky has noticeably gotten a lighter shade of blue. The focal point is the rugged mountain. As the mountain is forming …show more content…
This type of style is known as realism. It takes many, many years for an artist to master this technique. A famous example of realism is Leonard Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Now looking and examining Hina, someone would determine that she falls under the expressionism category. That’s because Butterfield has stated “I first used the horse images as a metaphorical substitute for myself–it was a way of doing a self-portrait.”(MMoCA) Expressionism is where the artist wants to express their emotional experience rather than impressions of the external world. This can be very therapeutic for artists and non-artists alike. A famous example of expressionism is Edvard Munch’s The