Essay #1

Kehinde Wiley’s Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (2013) is a two-dimensional oil on canvas painting measuring 48 by 36 inches. What first caught my attention were the bright colors of this piece, and especially the dress the woman in the painting was wearing. The dress has different shaped rectangles, squares and stripes with the primary colors; yellow, blue, red (just like a Mondrian) as well as some additional colors; pink, white, black. Wearing the dress is a young African American woman with short black hair, but dark blonde bangs swept to the side. She is holding up a sharp wooden rod in her left hand, while her right hand is resting over her heart. Her face has a blank expression, as she is looking straight towards the viewer of the painting. The background of the painting has a very floral pattern. There are some long green plants which twist around each other as if they were vines. The plants grow out different flowers, irises and smaller yellow flowers. Scattered around in some areas are also canaries.

Chitra Ganesh’s Eyes of Time (2014) is a two-dimensional, mixed-media wall mural installation. It is separated into three sections, the one which I choose was the section in the center. It is an abstract representation of the Hindu goddess Kali, which is the goddess of empowerment and destruction. She appears to have light blue skin, six arms, three breasts, three legs, and a golden clock (close to the one in Grand Central) as the head of the goddess. Coming behind of the clock is long black hair with several strands of red. Toward the bottom left side, her hair writes out some words such as “quicksand, rain, knowing, the haunted have suffoc-” Around her waist is a “skirt” of brown, blue and gray arms that with supposedly cut off with one of the c-shaped hooks she is holding in the first arm on the left side. The blood is made with red jewels. Her second arm, under the first described arm is a robotic arm with a variety of gems and twisted lines as if they were wires. The third arm holds a brown eyeball, and opposite of the third arm is an arm holding a red rope. Above the “rope-holding arm” is an arm that is stitched on, with some shimmery blood and pebbles around the shoulder of that arm. It also has some bracelets around the wrists. The last arm (first one of right side) has on a band of fur from wrist to forearm. One of the last elements of this mural is the robotic blue sphere one of the feet seem to be standing on.

Both of these pieces have similar meaning, resembling the empowerment of women. Kehinde Wiley portrays the woman in Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness as Saint John the Baptist, who is a man. With this painting and all others he has created he is trying to put forth the statement that women can be dominant as well, not just be categorized as “possessions”. Same goes for Chitra Ganesh’s Eyes of Time; in the piece I have chosen by her, is Kali the goddess in which is portrayed as a strong, powerful woman who is skilled of the destruction she has done.