Paul Auster describes the concept of Slow Art, the act of spending intentional time with an artwork, taking it in fully, in his novel Moon Palace:
“Look at the painting for no less than an hour, ignoring everything else in the room, […] giving yourself up to it as though there was nothing else but this painting in the entire world.”
I unfortunately don’t have the attention span to do this for a full hour, so instead I’m going to spend 10 minutes with Flora Macdonald Reid’s painting Fieldworkers. Standing with it quietly for a dedicated amount of time brought out new facets of the work that I would never have noticed otherwise. The piece is nuanced and layered in many ways that reveal themselves the longer you observe it. It is presumed to be set in France and depicts fieldworkers working in a French landscape, focusing on one man in particular in the foreground who is holding out a potato sack, staring into it.
It is fascinating to me that the artist uses bright red colour to paint the people’s faces/skin—and gets away with it! I didn’t notice the first time I walked past, but it’s almost amusing how strikingly unnoticeable it is. The face of the left man in the background is hinted at in entirely bright red colour. The man’s hand in the foreground is highlighted in the same bright red—almost blood red, but looks completely natural at first glance! His ear is deep red—shockingly, it doesn’t stand out! Ben Lustenhouwer, a Dutch portrait painter, once said that “ears never can be too red,” which is remarkably proven true by Reid’s painting.
You can make a game of picking a colour in this piece and finding where else it appears. The blue of the sleeve occurs again in the plants in the background, and even in the stem of the tree to the left of the foregrounded man. You can visualise the blue paint on Reid’s palette, being dotted around the painting in interesting and not particularly obvious ways. The green in the trousers reappears in the foreground fieldworker’s hair! Did you notice he has green hair? The earth is flesh-coloured like the cheeks of the two men closest to the viewer. I urge you to choose a colour and follow it through the picture.
Interestingly enough, the foreground fieldworker is illuminated from the back, not the front. This choice of lighting places the centre of the painting in shadow, particularly his face. This might suggest a certain anonymity in physical labour. Even in shadow, you can still make out his facial expression as tired or defeated. The light instead accentuates his hand, placing emphasis on hard physical labour. Simultaneously, he is shown as glowing, giving him a saint-like quality and underlining his importance in society.
Notice that the angles of the fieldworker in the foreground, his right arm, collar, and the direction he is glancing in, all lead downwards toward the potato sack. This, in combination with his illuminated back, makes it feel like the blazing sun is pressing on him, and his whole body sags under its weight. Even though the sun itself isn’t in the painting, it is somewhat the star of the show. The fieldworker looks into the potato sack, the perfect centre of the painting, as though he sees himself reflected. It seems he is pouring his tiredness and fatigue into the sack, which comes to represent his burden and physical struggle.
The painting feels like a moment in time, like the man has just stopped for a second to rest. Although we as viewers haven’t done the hard work, we are invited to enjoy and share this pause with the fieldworker under the roaring French sun.
“Fields” by grungepunk2010 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.