Assignment 10

Vlad Alexandru
Facultatea de Teatru i TV
CFM-RO An III










(John George Brown - Best Friends)

For the final assignment I chose one representative painting of the great American painter, John
George Brown. Representatively called Best Friends, the painting spotlights, through a
minimalistic composition, one of the primordial relationships of human platonic love, that
between the dog and its master.
We observe, in close up, the dog in a submission position towards his master, touching
the childs foot with his right paw. The painter accomplishes in this way not only the emotional
tenseness that we feel by viewing the painting, but also a continuum of body lines, connecting
the two shapes in a visual way through a network of lines.
Represented in white, the dog signifies the innocence and, in the same time, the purity of
the two souls. The purity and the unconditional presence of feelings are underlined by the visual
contact glances, highlighted by the confirmation smile on the young mans face.
The child holds in one hand the cap symbolizing the sacred connection created between
them, mentioning the good manners (taking the cap off) and paying his almost blind respect to
his friend. The sallow colours, that dominate the entire composition, associate to the painting the
concept of life and stability, the return to the conceptual fundaments of the social life.
The newly polished shoes, having near them the shoe cream and the wiper, represent the
beginning of the journey, the two friends, are about to take in pursuit of adventures and that of
the assays on the road of growing up and that of polishing the wild instinct, that lies deep inside
in our basic structure, from the moment we are given birth. The unsheathed neck reveals the
vulnerability of the age in facing the unknown and the million mistakes watching us from the
shadows and waiting for the right moment to show his claws.
We notice in the left corner of the painting the wooden closet which comes as a
addendum to the shapes assembly, through a architecture of vertical and horizontal lines,
providing, besides the obvious support lines for the child and that of the continuum of shapes, a
stability of the image as a whole. It also has the symbolic role, for the case being of accumulating
the values, hence the author points directly to the human moral values.
The inflexibility of the compositional assembly is noticed through the conceptualization
of the dynamic forms in fixed positions. As a consequence, we can organize, according to the
Gestalt concept, that the negative space and the proximity of the compositional forms relate into
a systemic spirit, generating the visual tenseness.
Framing the dog into the closet set up line not only that it offers us a visual stability of
the dogs forms dynamics, but it also subliminally induces the idea of a painting. The drama
comes from the abstract desire of the author to contextualize a state of mind, or to take it furthet
away, to contextualize an unconditional moral debt.
The painted time line represents a grim on the face of eternity. We cannot determine the
exact moment of the day the action is placed, and the presented situation appeals to our
conscience that recognizes the two bodies being in a state of leisure
The childs face is painted in red shades that render the state of energy and youths life,
visually sustained by the red colour of the cap and that of the shirt he is wearing. We are facing
an assembly nof elements that sustain the naturalness of the early life, but also the pragmatic
association, that the author wants to underline in reference to the brochure of not haggard desires
of the stereotypic temperament of the pre early childhood period.
The slightly broken sock, represents a little scarf, the result of the fights the child went
through in his short life. We can notice the vertical line that crosses the floor under the wipe
cream, showing the authors attention towards the details regarding the continuum of the lines.
Thus, all the forms of the composition succeed in uniting throught real highways of vertical,
oblique or horizontal lines.
If we fallow the direction of the shadows, we can notice the light that comes from a
source similar to our position, which offers us the position of the viewer in relation with the
characters, a position identical with that of the great theatres public. Thus, we become not only
part of the painting, but also a projection of our inner self, constantly searching, into the
memories, for that piece of life that we faced, as one of the greatest challenges that life offers
us: the childhood.
Projecting ourselves as viewers of our own childhood, the light also plays the part of
blindfolding the characters, that cannot see beyond their own universe, or better said they are
unable to see their future, the intel going only one way our projection in the past.
We become aware of our emotional side and we nostalgically empathize with the blurry
shadows of the flashbacks. We live, but, in the same time, we cannot control the cause which
drops us in the middle of the atemporal merry go- round of reported space and time.
The childs body is slightly inclined towards the dog, underlining the desire to intimacy
and contact between the two best friends. The light hair is seen as a symbol of spiritual wealth
referent to the age, but also as an addendum of the drawn concept with such an art by the author,
that being the window towards the inner world, infantile of every one of us.
The sited position of the small wooden chair, allows an exploration of the household
intimacy, but it also generates a representation of the accessibility and the leisure of the contract
between the two characters. Besides the small demand of affection, requested by the dog to its
master, we can also notice the human - nature consonance that is born at the contact between the
two parts involved. The return to our origins, as well as the connexion between the elements of
the world we came from, drawn in a similar manner to the creation of Adam, the well- known
scene painted by Michelangelo on the wall of The Sistine Chapel. The child turned into The God
in which the inferior being believes in, obeys and accepts as master. The balance between the
compositional elements is radically made, following a closed circle.
Looking for the symbolic meaning, we must first come out of the details fight and see
the painting as a whole.
The image represents a picture frame from life where the background and the useless
details are lost into a acuity of colours that we associate with easily remembered elements. This
inner reflection of nostalgia is being shaped into an assembly of metaphysical meanings where
the whole creating freedom of imagination remains trapped into a well-defined space and limited
by our own impossibility to report ourselves to the temporal dimension.
The semiotics regained at the visual grammar level becomes the guide of the fears that
dominated and fascinated us in the same time. Pleading in the merry go round of the plastic
insouciance that Brown shows in his painting, we can affirm that this masterpiece of visual arts
represents in the same time a symphony of elements whose essence is being found only in the
whole concept.
Thus, the Best Friends painting hides beyond the graphic elements an inner force
generated by the tenseness between the lines, the colours and the privileged shapes, which urges
us to let ourselves carried by the innocences wave back in the times where the feelings were
born and were lived out of spontaneity.