give me the heart on your neck

Arthur Trevethin Nowell, 1887 - Captives

Honestly where do I start? The movement? The composition? The lighting?

Look how much more it seems like she's leaning forward because the tree and the man curve away and around her? Like Tantalos who reached for fruit but the tree would bend away from him? That's what this feels like. And then there are these other two, pulling her away into the opposite direction. So there's a lot of movement! But what makes it even better is how he still stabilized the image with a lot of hidden vertical lines!

Also the contrasts? Fantastic! Like the one between the metal of his armor and her flowly dress or her light face vs the other faces kept in darkness or the light foreground vs the dark background,...

Also the edges are amazing! Everyone tells you corners are not important but here? Wrong! Her foot is like an anchor that stop the eye from falling out of the image so it's a lot more rendered than the flower petals.

And don't even get me started on the rendering...

The reason why it doesn't look like they're senselessly pulling at her? Because the action is actually built up like a spiral, whoa! There's a lot going on behind her back, but because of the spiral your eyes don't linger there and instead are lead towards her body and then towards her head.

It's not just the spiral, though, there's another line of movement hidden in those hands:

And not only that, they're grouped together in the shape of a pentagon! Simple shapes are easy to recognize, so it tells your eye where to go immediately.

I'm very sorry to single you out like this, but as an artist myself I feel like saying they did 'for fun' diminishes the incredible work and foresight that goes into creating a great composition.

Some of it might be intuition, yes, but back then most artists didn't have the luxury to paint things on a whim. Oil paint is expensive and was even more so in the past. The paint tube was only invented in 1840 and painters still mixed their own paint for decades after. Many pigments weren't readily available either. What I'm saying is, painting something big like this was an undertaking, not a fun project you could kick in the bucket if it didn't work out.

If you want to get more info I can only recommend reading Harold Speed's "The Practice and Science of Drawing"! The book came out in 1913, a time when some of these painters were still alive and it's truly fascinating! Especially the chapter where he breaks down "The Surrender of Breda" by Velasquez opened my eyes to a lot of things.

Anyways, I'll just leave you with this:

Jean Paul Gaultier

second image is a gif of Ted Danson from the tv show The Good Place subtitled "If soulmates do exist they're not found, they're made. People meet, they get a good feeling and then they get to work, building a relationship."

third image is text reading "The less love you put into things the more they resemble one another. The same goes for stories, everyone knows them by heart, but when someone tells them with love, I don't know, they seem new... that's what I think anyway. -Andrés Neuman, Traveler of the Century (trans. Nick Caistor & Lorenza Garcia)"

fourth image is text reading "... I feel a stupefying pressure under my skin... I want to pierce everything and penetrate as far down as possible. I want to reach the depths of the earth. My love is there, in the place where seeds grow green and roots reach one another, and creature perpetuates itself amidst decay. It's as if my body is a temporary and transient form of it. I want to reach its source. I want to hang my heart like a ripened fruit on all the branches of the trees. -Forugh Farrokhzad, from letter to Ebrahim Golestan, Another Birth and Other Poems, tr. Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée"

fifth image is an anonymous tumblr ask reading "romance is a form of creativity. it is the ability to see the potential for beauty in the everyday. freezing flowers in ice so they release floral notes as they melt; learning to draw; taking the scenic way-- these acts ask us to leave behind the pragmatic and pay attention to the fanciful, the sensory. in a world devoted to efficiency and pro-ductivity, living with romance is a way of reclaiming ones own life. it is a way of saying: being alive is worth-while for its own sake because i make it so."