In this painting, The Scream, there was no specific image to suggest the horror of the scream. The central image in the painting made people’s hair standing on end. He seemed to pass by and turn to the rail stretching far away. He was clutching his ears and neither heard the pedestrian's footsteps in the distance, nor saw the distant two boats and church’s spires, otherwise, the loneliness tightly wounding him was perhaps cut.
This loner who was completely separated from the real world seemed to have been conquered by his innermost fear. This image was highly exaggerated and the deformed and distorted screaming faces were completely comic. The wild eyes and sunken cheeks made people reminiscent of the skulls associated with death. This was simply a screaming ghost. “It can only be made by a mad man”, Edvard Munch wrote in the sketch.
In this Edvard Munch painting, the color used by Munch maintained a certain association with the nature. Although blue water, brown land, green trees and red sky had been exaggeratedly expressive, they did not lose the rough authenticity of the colors. The colors of the whole painting were depressed: the thick blood red was suspended above the horizon, giving people with foreboding feeling. It conflicted with the purple on the shade of sea, the purple became increasingly gloomy because of the distant stretching out. The same purple repeatedly appeared in the lonely clothes. And his head and hands were painted pale and brown.
The painting was full of turmoil. The twisted curves of the sky and water formed the strong contrast with the direct erect lines of the bridge. In a rotating movement, the whole composition was full of rough and strong rhythm. All the form’s elements seemed to convey the piercing scream. The artist here could be said to use a visual symbol to convey the auditory experience and turn the miserable scream into a visible vibration. The technique expression of the acoustic image may be associated with the image manifestation of force and energy in Van Gogh Starry Night. Here, Munch made the inner anxiety generated by screaming into a convincing abstract image. So, he played the emotional expression of the painting to the extreme.
The Scream 1893
