William Holden Hunt

In searching for a new image to analyze, I poked through a number of artists and paintings. Pages and pages of nundescript landscapes and portraits of dead people. I was not seeing and thing that captivated me or was interesting until I came across "The Scapegoat". It was the first image in about 10 minutes that actually made me stop, look at it and then look at it some more. So I thought, why did this particular image captivate me. We have already discussed my attraction to an earthy palette. But there was more than that. We have a long haired goat standing in the middle of a desert. There are dead plants, animal skeletons and an arid landscape surrounding for miles. And then we have this goat standing here. Why? How did he come to this place, this foresaken wasteland? Coming back to the color palette, Hunt has used a similar color scheme for the animal and its surroundings in order to associate the two, yet it seems out of place. It is alone having no other animals sharing in its plight. I believe that the mystery and the narrative in conjunction with the color palette and the odd subject matter, plus the superb rendering of the animal, its shadow and the mountains yields an artistic expression that makes the viewer want to know and see more.