Ohashi Atake No Yudachi Sudden Shower Over Shin-Ohashi Bridge And Atake. Research Paper - Essay Example

Indeed such abstractions have empowered the picture to attract its viewers universally. It is evident that Hiroshige’s artwork communicates with the viewers through a particular space-time matrix that essentially has exceeded the limitation of time. Hiroshige’s “Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake” is fraught with a set of themes that serve him with the scope to convey a versatile and multifaceted meaning. Formal Analysis In a typical evening, it has suddenly started to rain heavily from the sagging dark clouds.

The almost discernible raindrops have formed an opaque curtain of slant crisscrossing lines showing their downward tracks. Through this curtain of rains, one can see the massive Shin Ohashi Bridge, standing high in the gray-blue expanse of the Sumida. Hurrying men and women are trying to protect themselves with umbrellas, a traditional Japanese straw mat or hat from the torrents of rain. Meanwhile, the boatman in the Sumida River is sailing to his destination in an indifferent posture to the torrents of rains. . Japanese Ukiyo-e or a picture of ‘floating world’ often ventures to capture the beauty of a short-fleeting moment, as a contemporary Japanese artist, Asai Ryoi defines ,it as following: “Living only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms [Sakura] and the maple leaves….

diverting ourselves in just floating, floating. refusing to be disheartened…..this is what we call the floating world.”2 The theme of an Ukiyo-e often is associated with to ‘empathy towards things’ or ‘a sensitivity of transience of things”3 since an Ukiyo-e is the visual version of ‘mono no aware’. According to Khoon Choy Lee, the overriding theme of an Ukiyo-e is the awareness of the transience, of things, that produces a sense of bittersweet cognition of how things flow inevitably flow out into the past.

4 Since things flow out the past or beauty is not everlasting, human attempt to retain it forever essentially gives birth to the pathos.5 In the three-dimensional landscape of Shin-Ohashi, the iconographic appearance of the hurrying men and women sketched from a remote vantage point and viewed through the opaque curtain of rain conveys the static dynamism of his theme of the floating world. Indeed the opacity rainy texture contributes to the picture’s mysterious and uncertain environment. The artist’s vantage in the picture greatly allows the remote objects and the people turn into almost abstraction using contours in implied lines.

Though the use of light and shadow clearly contributes to the realism of Hiroshige’s work, the glow of the light surpasses the reality of its atmosphere and adds to its surrealism to a