Caravaggio

After watching the video in class about Caravaggio, I was intrigued. His paintings all told a story and as an artist he thought outside of the box. His techniques were different, his style was different, and his paintings were different. Something that was interesting to me that we learned from the video was the way he painted. He never drew, he only looked and then painted what he saw. Caravaggio challenged the way painting was suppose to be especially in his time. He used dark colors, he painted sick people, death, and portrayed so much emotion through his paintings. That is something that captivated me, the expressions of the people in his paintings. The dramatic and bold colors all tied in to tell a story. In his painting Judith Beheading Holofernes, we see death which was a common theme in his paintings, along with the facial expressions of all three individuals in the painting. It's obvious and fascinating how Caravaggio used light and dark to emphasize what was important and what he wanted us to focus on in his paintings. In this painting the background is all dark but light is surrounding and coming out of the individuals. I think this was done to focus on the action being committed.