The lines created by her arms allow the eye to move freely across the canvas. The right-hand dancer turns her torso around fully, and doing so she encourages us to gaze where she is, back at the center of the composition. Rhythm pervades Derain's piece because of his selection of dance as a subject, but also because of the use of curvilinear forms that keep the eye flowing. Moreover, colors repeat themselves enthusiastically, spread out across the canvas and avoiding stagnation.
At first glance, Edward Hooper's Early Sunday Morning exudes stillness and with its straight lines is nothing like Derain's Dance. The town is asleep, businesses closed for the day and not a person is in sight. Yet it is precisely the lack of people that makes Hooper's composition so compelling and full of suggested motion. The viewer's imagination fills the shops with life. Similarly, the long shadows created by the sun are bound to move. A traditional barber pole is strategically placed in the painting. Its swirls counteract the excessive linearity of the rest of the composition, a similar function served by the fire hydrant. The pole's swirls also suggest movement in the same way that the swirling lines do in Derain's painting. Just as the all-red dancer in Derain's composition does, the barber pole offers an anchor for the eye after it wanders around the painting searching for signs of life.
3. The human figures are placed in the left visual fields in both Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World and Richard...
For example, Christina's outstretched body laying in the field forms a diagonal, her left hand all but pointing directly to the farmhouse in the distance. From the farmhouse, the eye returns to Christina because the moved section of grass forms an arch that curves down toward her body. Thus, Wyeth creates a circular motion, which he repeats with the tractor tracks that lead away from the farm house and which frame Christina's form. The contrast of her figure and pink dress with the linearity, starkness, and earthen colors of the rest of the scene also repeatedly draw the eye to the bottom left portion of the canvas.
In a similar way, the viewer's eye is drawn back continually to the woman and man in Diebenkorn's composition. The straight lines from the windows in the background point to the two human figures just as the arch of mowed grass does in Christina's World. Just as Christina is framed by the combination of the grass and the tractor tracks, the woman and man in Diebenkorn's painting are framed by both horizontal and vertical lines from the doorway, windows, and floor rug. The woman also stands, her form perpendicular to the artist's table and lap to anchor the eye there. Blue colors at the doorway, windows, and rug accent the blue colors in their clothes to create unity and visual equilibrium.
