RVA Midterms

Why do we study art?

Why do we study art?

-        encourages self-expression and creativity

-        develops critical thinking and the ability to appreciate the world around us

-        provides opportunity to acquire new skills

Visual Literacy

-        a set of abilities that enables an individual to effectively find, interpret, evaluate, use, and create images and visual media.

Reading Visual Arts

-        is the ability to read, analyze, and critique works of visual arts.

Reading

-        is the process of forming a perception based on the imagery, form, and language of the text, translated through the experience of the reader ( Cramer, Ortlieb, and Cheek 2007).

How to read and Understand Visual Arts?

Theme
Mood
Tone

Theme

meaning of painting, rather than the subject

Mood

the feeling expressed by the artwork

Tone

refers to the lightness or darkness of colored used

 

Aesthetics

the philosophical study of beauty and taste.

Intuitive

based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning.

Fine Arts

creative art, especially visual art whose products are to be appreciated primarily or solely for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content.

Form

refers to the physical nature of at work.

Formalism

is the study of art by analyzing and comparing form and style.

Human condition

refers to the characteristics and key events that compose the essentials of human existence, including birth, learning, emotion, aspiration, conflict, and death.

Mimesis

this is a Greek word and means “imitation”. It is the process of imitation or mimicry through which artists portray and interpret the world.

Muses

sources of inspiration for a creative artist

Pre-modern/pre-aesthetic (ancient Greece and Rome)

-        focused on capturing ideal ideas of beauty and the human form; Romans were interested in realistically portraying individuals.

Pre-modern/pre-aesthetic (ancient Greece and Rome)

-        idealization of the subject matter

Pre-modern/pre-aesthetic (ancient Greece and Rome)

-        artists are commissioned by the elite /religious leaders to advance their ideas to the people

Pre-modern/pre-aesthetic (ancient Greece and Rome)

-        religion took key roles within the visual arts for hundred of years

Modern/Aesthetic (1700s to mid 1900s)

-        more on producing art that was beautiful rather than having a deeper meaning.

Modern Art/Modernism

-        was viewed as both an art and philosophical movement at the time of its emergence. This movement reflected the immense longing of artists to produce new forms of art, philosophy, and social structures that precisely reflected the newly developing world.

Postmodernism/Post aesthetic (mid 1900s up to present)

-        focused on ideology in the maintenance of economic and political power

Postmodernism/Post aesthetic (mid 1900s up to present)

-        described a form of art in which artists were able to truly express what they thought and felt, with pieces from this period typically characterized by complete freedom from politics and other societal influences.

Renaissance

emphasized skill level and beauty

Pre-modern/pre-aesthetic( ancient Greece and Rome)

o   Art works were commissioned by religious leaders/ church or by aristocats for hundred years.

Renaissance

there was no artistic freedom

According to _____

-  art is mimesis, an imitation. He criticized them for not being able to put ideal realities that he referred to as “forms” or “ideas”. It was just a simple and poor copy of perfect ideal forms.

Aristotle

o   for him, art was not a mere copying. Art idealizes nature and completes its faults seeking to grasp the universal type in the individual phenomenon.

Visual Art

-        are art forms that created primarily for visual perception, as drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, photography, video, film making, and architecture.

Visual Art

-        It has significant cultural component and aim at communicating ideas, entertaining, awakening emotions in us, and much more.

Art according to Oxford Dictionary

Art is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

Andy Warhol

Art is what you can get away with.

Gauguin

Art as either plagiarism or revolution

Visual Literacy

-        is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image, extending the meaning of literacy, which commonly signifies interpretation of a written or printed text. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be "read" and that meaning can be through a process of reading.

Visual Literacy

-        the ability to construct meaning from everything we see

Gillian Mclver

The most important mechanism for interpreting visual art is your own eyes and your ability to really see and to really look…..Go, stand in front of the work of art, literally, physically, look at it. Walk around it, look at its texture, look at its colour…

Reading Visual Arts is…

• context dependent

• an active process

• cultural trajectory

• applying selection and omission

• focus on one element first, then try to link them into the other elements to create a meaningful interpretation that will lead to evaluation

Analyzing Artwork (Art Criticism)

• description

• analyze

• interpretation

• evaluation

Description

-        what do you see?

Analyze

-        how did the artist do it?

Interpretation

what is the artist trying to say?

Evaluation

-        what do I think about this artwork?

Role of visual arts in the society

-        Cultural preservation

-        Inspiration and expression

-        Social and political activism

-        Historical Interpretation

Visual Arts

-        forms perceived by the eye

Painting

-        evoke emotion from the viewers

Sculpture

representing an imagined or observed objects in hard materials

Architecture

provides us the structure we lived

Performing Arts

-        forms in which the artist used his/her own body, face, and presence as a medium

Literary Arts

centered on creative writing and other composition: intended for reading

Line

-        is the path left by moving a point. For example, a pencil, or a brush dipped in paint

Color

-        red, yellow & blue are primary colors which means they can’t be mixed by using other colors. In theory, all other colors can be made from these 3 colors.

Tone

-        refers to the lightness or darkness of something. Tone and shading can be used to make 2D look 3D form.

Pattern

is a design that is created by repeating lines, shapes tones and colors

Motif

a design which keeps occurring

Texture

-        describes the surface quality of something. Actual texture really exists.

Visual Texture

 is created using marks to represent texture

Line

-        a 2 -dimensional path through space including length but not width or depth.

Line

-        can be thick, thin, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, curve, curly, spiral, zigzag, etc. Some lines are invisible.

Formal Qualities of Line

• Has weight: thin, heavy, bold, delicate, varied etc.

• Has action: dynamic, static, restful

• Has character: straight, curved, organic

• It can construct, render, describe, divide, be implied

• May imply direction or movement, define figures, measure, fill, shade etc.

Shape

-        a two -dimensional figure displaying only height and width

Two Major types of shape in art

• geometric

• organic

Geometric shapes

o   are mathematical and include squares, circles, and triangles

Organic shapes

o   are assymetrical or irregular in shape such as blob, splatter, or spiked shape.

Texture

-        appeals to our sense of touch, which can evoke feelings of pleasure, discomfort, or familiarity.

Three -dimensional artwork

-        relies on the material used like marble, bronze, clay, metal, or wood.

Two-dimensional medium texture

-        may either be real or implied. It can be enhanced or downplay through the manipulation of light and angle. It could be smooth, rough, matte, glossy, etc.

Color

-        used to portray mood, light, depth, and point of view in a work of art.

Primary Colors

red, blue, yellow

Secondary colors

o   mixing two primary colors together

Tertiary colors

o   mixing a primary and secondary

Warm

active

Cold

passive

Shade

adding black to a hue

Tint

o   adding white to a hue

Tones

adding gray to a hue

Hue

-        basically any color on the color wheel. When you are using a color wheel or a color picker, you can adjust the saturation and luminance of a hue.

Saturation

is the intensity or purity of the color

Luminance

is the amount of brightness or lightness in a color

Pattern

-        an element (or set of elements) that is repeated in a piece of work or an associated set of works

Pattern

-        are diverse and useful as a tool that grabs a viewer's attention, whether it be subtle or very apparent.

Tone

-        can be an important tool to produce contrast within an artwork, creating a sense of opposition and tension between different elements or placing focus on particular parts of the composition.

Three Types of Tone

dark tones, mid-tones and light tones.

Dark tones

o   can be used to create a sense of drama or darkness

Light tones

o   are effective at drawing the viewer’s attention to a certain point, especially when contrasted against a dark background.

Global tone

-        is the overall impression of colour that you get when considering the painting as a whole, such as the bright yellow of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1887).

Local Tone

refers to the lightness or darkness of a specific area within the painting. This may be used to emphasize a particular subject or area, or to contrast this to the rest of the artwork