Comparison Of Niagara And Celebrate The Earth

What aspect about a picture expresses the sheer magnitude of a subject? It doesn’t just require having a massive subject for the work. What is it about them that pulls the viewer in and not be able to look away? The natural beauty that the subject holds with out a doubt is a factor. Although, of course the subject matter is important, but how the subject is portrayed through artistic techniques is even more important. Fredrick Edwin in his painting Niagara and Stuart Franklin in his photo Celebrate the Earth both use positive and negative spacing to convey the theme of magnitude of nature, although they differ in use of tones and lighting.
The use of spacing in both of these works effectively displays how large each of these natural wonders
If one looks into the backgrounds of these artist, and into some works they have produced, it can be obviously seen that these images obviously share a tone of natural wonder. Stuart Franklin and Fredrick Church have both been known to have a multitude of works appreciating nature. (Franklin; Howat) Also, both of these can be thought as works painting out the intricacy’s of these natural wonders, as Church referred to it many times in his diary’s and Franklin's history of natural art.(Franklin; National Gallery of Art) Niagara differs from Celebrate the Earth in that it was painted mainly to show the beauty, sheer power, and massiveness to what was thought to be the nations greatest wonder at the time.(Nga.gov) Church went into great efforts to paint out the “sound” in the falls in order to show its intensity, and went further with emphasizing that tone of intensity by making the falls brighter than the rest of the
One point that was being emphasized using lighting in both works was the vastness of the subject.(Franklin; Howat) This was done in both by using spread lighting, with an equally flat but detailed backdrop. They differ in lighting by Niagara having its falls very lit, while Celebrate the Earth only has a few bright spots. Other than the falls the only real bright points are the stars and rainbow on the left side of the image (see fig.2). The bright points in Celebrate the Earth are all spread out, from the plant in the very front of the image, to the lit mountain in the very back of the image. So even though the effect was the same, how they achieved it was indeed