Word: motif
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Turner had been to the Alps. Church would go to South America. He made, in fact, two trips, in 1853 and 1857, and discovered his great motif, the volcano of Cotopaxi. He painted it dozens of times, and in the end the effort of grappling with the utterly unfamiliar landscape of the Andes forced him to maturity as a painter. By 1866, when he set down the glittering double-arc rainbow that spans from bare mountain to jungle in Rainy Season in the Tropics, he had attained a rhetorical grandeur of painted space that...
...grimly secludes itself in an immense circle of volcanic and comparatively barren country." The nearest palms were a hundred miles away. But without foreground vegetation, there was no hope of making the volcano look like a painting -- bringing it into the scheme of heroic Claudean and Turneresque landscape, the motif framed by arches of trees or cliffs in the foreground, with pictorial incidents unrolling back in space toward the distant peak. So, like all landscape painters, he "improved...
Whether the motif is jazz or swing, classical or ragtime, there is one constant in the films of Woody Allen: good music sets both the mood and the pace. The meticulous attention to scoring is no coincidence. Comedian Allen is deadly earnest when it comes to music, especially the New Orleans jazz style he favors most...
...facile distinctions between soft drugs (marijuana, mild hallucinogens) and hard drugs (heroin and now crack), does share responsibility for creating an environment that legitimized and even, until recently, lionized the cocaine culture. This wink-and-a-nod acceptance, this implicit endorsement of illicit thrills, has been a continuing motif in movies, late-night television and rock music. My personal life may rarely intersect with impoverished drug addicts, but the entertainment media created in the image of people like me easily transcend these barriers of class, race and geography...
Commercial exploitation of the flag is commonplace in print, on television and around business premises. Since such use (almost by definition) debases the flag, should it be outlawed? What should be done about garments featuring % a flaglike motif? When a flag is cut and sewed into a shirt, is it still a flag...