People always say that the eyes are the windows of a person’s thoughts. The eyes reflect the inside feelings and emotions of a person. Focus is like the eyes of the artwork. Looking at the focus of an artwork, we can sense and guess the ideas and the thoughts the artists want us to see. It helps the viewer to receive the message. I sometimes have problems with staying in focus by creating colorful images. Consequently, I am a fan of using words in my images. However, the exhibition in MOMA shows me the ways of making focus. The use of color and arrangement of the components are two of the major techniques of creating focus.
Color is the most common factor to stand out the focus. Many works I see in MOMA, express the artists’ skills of color matching. A color image can be an eye candy, but without focus, it will be like a wordy essay that is boring and confused sometimes. In a colorful picture, we can create a focus by contrast the colors. For example, Jackson Pollock’s abstract painting, “Full Fathom Five”, has a huge area of dark colors as background, and a very bright little yellow dot on the right upper side. I would like to say that the yellow dot is only 1% of the whole picture. You can only see the yellow dot when you are in front of the real work. It is almost invisible on the pictures I took with the camera. Although the yellow dot is so small, it catches our eyes so well, and is the focus of this huge painting. This sharp yellow color contrast the dirty dark background colors, and it’s like telling us that the artist sees the hope after suffering in the dark world. Another collection, “Untitled I-V”, from Joseph Benys, proves us the importance of color in creating focus by placing subjects with contrasting colors together. The focuses have different colors with many other subjects that all have similar colors. Therefore, color can be used to distinguish the focus.
Beside color, the way of arranging the elements in the artwork affect the focus as well. From the previous examples, we might see that all the focuses are the minority of the artworks, so we should not place our focus among many other same type of subjects. In Marc Chagall’s “Birthday”, we can discover the secret of arranging the elements. In this picture, there is a room, and the couple in the middle if the room is the focus. There are colorful blankets on the wall and on the bed, the desk is colorful because of the plates and fruits, and the view outside the window is also colorful. Everything is colorful beside the couple. The woman is wearing a plain black dress and the man is with a plain green shirt. However, the plain colors move our attention from the colorful background to the couple. The couple is the minor group in the picture, and they successfully become the focus. Another work “Untitled (A real Sum is a Sum of people)”from Mario Mevs, is my favorite. This work is a group of photographs of a restaurant with various numbers of people inside. This series of pictures show us how the focus can be changed as the elements in the picture are changed. First we see an empty restaurant, in which is hard for us to find the focus; then in the next photo we have one person in the restaurant, in which we immediately find the man to be the focus. The artist keeps adding the number of people in the restaurant, and of course the focus of the photo is changing too. As there are more people, the focus becoming to be the places wit lighter color or less elements. When there are 55 people in the restaurant, the focus is surprisingly the white sheet on the table. Therefore, in the same picture, the focus can be changed as you place the elements differently.
There is a theme is every artwork, focus is like the tool to emphasize the theme, and every element around the focus is to explain the theme. I should practice these skills I obtained in the MOMA exhibition, so I won’t rely on putting words on the images in order to delivery my messages. When we make images we should pay more attention on the colors and arrangement of the components to express our focus.