After wandering about the museum and viewing the majority of the pieces therein, I found my way back upstairs. My favorite thing in the whole place happened to be a picture that intrigued me. The piece was an oil on canvas painting labeled “Upper Chena”. This painting was done by an artist named James Behlke, the label did not say where the artist was from but it did say that it was completed in 1984 and donated to the museum by another couple. The painting is displayed just above where the museum keeps boards to write on, on the little wall before entering the “Place Where You Go to Listen”.
The painting is just as it’s name describes, a view of the “Upper Chena”. As a whole, this was a painting of a river starting right at the bottom edge of the frame and running up to disappear back between the trees and shrubs of one bank and the trees and shrubs of a nearby hill that is ablaze with the colors of fall. This particular painting got my attention because of the style in which the artist chose to represent the river and how he managed to capture the look of how it would actually look on a sunny fall morning. He managed to create an illusion in which the viewer believes that what they are looking at is truly wet and is actually flowing over and around the rocks. This has been done by showing where the water has hit the rocks and where the sun is reflecting off of the surface of the placid river.
In my opinion, the focal point of the piece, although not centered, was the small group of white birch trees that were placed off to the right of the painting, almost on the edge. It was here that drew my eye, even though they were to the side, they stand out against the fall colors and are in the fore front, eclipsing the hill and dwarfing the shrubs around them.
There are many forms of line used in this painting. Rippling lines show the current in the river, short lines show the pokiness of the spruce trees, longer close together lines show the density of the shrubs, rounded lines show the smooth surfaces of the big rocks, and long sweeping lines show the texture of the hill in the distance.
My own experiences shape my view of this particular painting because I have seen parts of the upper Chena during almost every season. I may even have been to this very spot if the artist had painted a place on the river that is close to the road. There is also a lot of history that he included in his painting, not human history but that of nature. The artist captured how this place looked on this day in 1984, granted I have never been to this exact place as things change over the years, but I may have been to this location with older trees, smaller rocks, and perhaps a change in the curve of the river.
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