Black Belt Analysis

This painting focuses on the night scenes and crowd scenes, heavily influenced by jazz culture and skin tones of women and women themselves because they were not focused on around this time. This painting annunciates skin tone as something diverse, inclusive, and pluralistic.

Documenting women of varying blood quantities like octoroon, quadroon, and mulatto. From the first look Motley takes viewers outside one of Bronzeville’s many nightspots. He gives you the cigarettes and cigar shop.

A estaurant you can drop in to eat at that’s connected to the hotel. You can see people congregating by the buildings hang out, chatting having a nice time enjoying the night. There is a blue taxi at the stop light Just in case someone needs a ride.

With this being a night scene oil painting, Motley uses various forms of dark colour contrasts. The background is not very detailed. The sky in the background fades down to the street and the streets fades up to the sky. There is also no difference in the street and the sidewalks because theyre both painted with the same the colours.

The actual focal point when you look at painting, your eyes immediately goes to the line of people standing outside the building. You look to the left and see a man bending down receiving the newspaper or to the right to the man standing beside him with his hands in his pockets with a despair/sorrow look.

This man possibly feels this way because there is no one to accompany him for the night or he’s out of money. There is also man with a blue suit and white gloves that’s holding his hands up telling the hold before crossing the street like traffic director.

Since Motley shows emphasis on the women skin tones with use of sfumato. They are dressed with form a fitting dress that shows off their fgures. Motleys uses various forms of light and dark colours for the women dresses.

You see them in red, yellow, light green to show off their skin tones. You see more of them pictured versus the men. The men are dressed with dark suits majority blue and black. Mingling with the women as if they were their dates for the night. Motley uses disproportional figures in his painting hich gives the piece more fulfilment.

With him doing that he creates a form fitting piece of art with little negative space.

My feelings towards this painting was semi mellow but filled with excitement at the same time. The reason why I filled with excitement was because back in this time of America, African Americans wasn’t really allowed to have this much of enjoyment without some point of racism being brought about. When I first saw it, the first thing I noticed was the line of people that were waiting outside.

I assumed they were waiting to get inside a night club because they were dressed is nice dresses accompanied by men in suits to escort them. Since racism was in the south, the Motley painting setting was described up north; the picture shows the improvement of African American lives if they were able to relocate to the north where freedom was established. Although this picture was during the time of racism, the people seem too had forgotten about what’s going on in life and is making the most of their night having fun while spending time with each other.