unit 1.pdf

• Art is in everything and everywhere you look
• Opening your eyes to the world of art is essential
in understanding the world around you
• Appreciation of the visual arts goes beyond
staring at a painting hanging on the wall of a
museum

For many people, art is a tangible thing: a painting, sculpture, photograph,
dance, poem or play
Art is uniquely human and tied directly to culture.
As an expressive medium, it allows us to experience wide ranges of
emotion, between joy or sorrow, or confusion and clarity.
It gives voice to ideas and feelings, connects us to the past, reflects the
present, and anticipates the future. Visual art is a rich and complex
subject, and its definition is in flux as the culture around it changes.

What has been your
exposure to Art?

What has been your prior exposure to visual art?
Has it been primarily from your family? School? Social activities?
Personal explorations?
Do you make art? If so, what kind?
What is the medium you use?
What kind of style is it?
Who is your audience?
If you haven’t made any art, have you ever wanted to? What kind?

Art is uniquely human and tied directly to culture.
It takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary.
It asks questions about who we are, what we value, the meaning of
beauty and the human condition.
As an expressive medium it allows us to experience sublime joy, deep
sorrow, confusion and clarity. It tests our strengths, vulnerabilities and
resolve.
It gives voice to ideas and feelings, connects us to the past, reflects the
present and anticipates the future

Visual art is a rich and complex subject whose definition is in
flux as the culture around it changes.
Because of this, how we define art is in essence a question of
agreement.
In this respect, we can look again to the dictionary's definition
for an understanding of exactly what to look for when we
proclaim something as 'art.'

• Every person is born with the innate desire to create art, and
similar to other professions, training is essential in honing skills
to produce art
• Art education broadens a person's comprehension, development,
and visions of art
• Art brings an understanding of diversity, how people lived in the
past, and connects the issues concerning contemporary life and
art today

• Gaining the knowledge to understand the art
• Acquire the art methods and materials to discuss
art verbally or by the written word
• Ability to identify the movements from ancient
cultures to today's contemporary art

• Literature - poetry, drama, story, and so on
• Visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.)
• Graphic arts (painting, drawing, design, and other
forms expressed on flat surfaces)
• Plastic arts (sculpture, modeling)
• Decorative arts (enamelwork, furniture design,
mosaic, etc.)
• Performing arts (theatre, dance, music), music (as
composition)
• Architecture

Form: the physical and visible characteristics inherent in works of art;
Formal distinctions include a work's size, medium (painting, drawing,
sculpture or other kind of work) and descriptions of compositional
elements, such as the lines, shapes, and colors involved
Content: the meaning we derive from them; any visual clues that provide
an understanding of what the art tells us. Sometimes an artwork's content
is vague or hidden and needs more information than is present in the
work itself

Form
• Form means the constituent elements of a work of art
independent of their meaning (e.g., the colour, composition,
medium or size of a flag, rather than its emotional or national
significance)
• Formal elements include primary features: these include
colour, dimensions, line, mass, medium, scale, shape, space,
texture, value, and their corollaries.
• The secondary features are the relations of the primary
features with one another: these include balance,
composition, contrast, dominance, harmony, movement,
proportion, proximity, rhythm, similarity, unity, and variety

Content
history: important incidents like famous battles, political triumphs, social
movements, etc.
megalography: the portrayal of historically important people or things in an
absurdly glorifying manner, as if they weren’t really human or ordinary at all
mythology: stories of gods, goddesses, nymphs and heroes, usually (but not
exclusively) Greek or Roman in origin
religion: the portrayal of sacred narratives and legends from the world’s holy texts
portraiture: likenesses of real people, usually (but not exclusively) of at least
moderate social standing
landscape: representations of places, urban and rural, whether real or imagined
genre: not to be confused with “genres” (the categories in general), the portrayal
of scenes of everyday life, including people but not specifically for the purposes of
portraiture
still-life: objects, furniture, settings, utensils, flowers, foods, etc., without obvious
stories or important people

The primary content is the simplest
way of taking inventory of what you
see, as in literal images;
straightforward subjects and imagery;
and describable facts, actions, and/or
poses.
You might think, “what you see is
what you get.” The primary content in
a picture of a well-groomed older
woman sitting in a chair in an
important looking office is just that —
a well-groomed older woman sitting
in a chair in an important looking
office.

The secondary content includes things
which push “what you see” into “what you
understand,” so to speak. Anyone can
recognize a woman in a chair, but a certain
knowledge is required to recognize that the
woman is Thatcher.
Allegories, Attributes,
Personifications, Traditional signs,
Metaphor, Metonymy, synecdoche,
irony, parody

1. Which of the following would be an example of form in art?
a) The colors and tonalities used in a painting
b) The placement of a painting in an exhibition
c) A title that gives a clue to a painting's meaning

1. Which of the following would be an example
of form in art?
a) The colors and tonalities used in a painting
b) The placement of a painting in an exhibition
c) A title that gives a clue to a painting's meaning

2. Which of the following would be an example of content in
art?
a) The type of brushstroke used to define a line
b) The reputation of the artist who made the work
c) A historical reference depicted in an image

Visual Art
Everywhere we look, we see images designed to command our
attention, including images of desire, images of power, religious
images, images meant to recall memories, and images

Historic idea of development of Art
• The idea of art has developmentally progressed from human
prehistory to the present day.
• The ancient Greeks saw the goal of visual art as copying, or
mimesis.
• Nineteenth-century art theorists promoted the idea that art is
communication: it produces feelings in the viewer.
• In the early twentieth century, the idea of significant form, the
quality shared by aesthetically pleasing objects, was proposed as a
definition of art.
• Today, many artists and thinkers agree with the institutional theory
of art, which shifts focus from the work of art itself to who has the
power to decide what is and is not art.

Art as Mimesis
Imitation of the real world
The ancient Greeks felt that the visual artist's goal was to copy visual experience. This approach appears in
the realism of ancient Greek sculpture and pottery. We must sadly note that, due to the action of time and
weather, no paintings from ancient Greek artists exist today. We can only surmise their quality based on
tales such as that of Zeuxis and Parhassios, the obvious skill in ancient Greek sculpture, and in drawings that
survive on ancient Greek pottery

Zeux is and Parhassios, rival
painters from ancient
Greece in the late fifth cen
tury BCE who competed for
the title of greatest artist.
Zeuxis painted a bowl of
grapes that was so lifelike
that birds came down to
peck at the image of fruit.
Parhassios was
unimpressed with this
achievement.
Zeuxis conceding defeat: "I have deceived the birds, but
Parhassios has deceived Zeuxis."
Artist: Joachim von Sandrart; engraving by Johann Jakob von
Sandrart

When viewing Parhassios's
work, Zeuxis, on his part, asked
that the curtain over the
painting be drawn back so he
could see his rival's work
more clearly. Parhassios
declared himself the victor
because the curtain was the
painting, and while Zeuxis
fooled the birds with his work,
Parhassios fooled a thinking
human being-a much more
difficult feat
Zeuxis conceding defeat: "I have deceived the birds, but
Parhassios has deceived Zeuxis."
Artist: Joachim von Sandrart; engraving by Johann Jakob von
Sandrart

• Jackson Pollock (1912-1956,
USA), a leader in the New York
School of the 1950s, intentionally
did not copy existing objects in
his art.
• While painting these works,
Pollock and his fellow artists
would consciously avoid making
marks or passages that
resembled recognizable objects.
• They succeeded at making
artwork that did not copy
anything
Left: The She-Wolf; Right:Gothic
Artist: Jackson Pollock

A later attempt at defining art comes from the nineteenth-century
Russian author Leo Tolstoy.
Tolstoy wrote on many subjects, and is the author of the great
novel War and Peace (1869). He was also an art theorist.
He proposed that art is the communication of feeling, stating,
"Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man
consciously by means of certain external signs, hands on to others
feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by
these feelings and also experience them."

• In 1913 English art critic Clive Bell proposed that art is significant form, or the
"quality that brings us aesthetic pleasure."
• Bell stated: "to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a
sense of form and colour."
• In Bell's view, the term "form" simply means line, shape, mass, as well as color.
• However, aesthetics, pleasure in the beauty and appreciation of art, are
impossible to measure or reliably define. What brings aesthetic pleasure to one
person may not affect another.
• Aesthetic pleasure exists only in the viewer, not in the object. Thus significant
form is purely subjective.

Figure 1.4 I Perception: Art and Science
Author: Jeffrey LeMieux

Subjective and Objective
Perspectives

• The first level in approaching art is learning to look at it. (In
future discussions we will spend more time in pure observation
than you probably have done before.)
• Generally, we tend to look at art in terms of "liking" it first, and
"looking" at it later.
• From this perspective, the subjective (that is, the knowledge that
resides in the emotions and thoughts of the viewer) almost
completely dominates our way of looking at art.

• In the arts, it's especially important to begin to develop an informed or
objective opinion rather than just an instinctual reaction.
• An objective view is one that focuses on the object's physical
characteristics as the main source of information.
• This does not mean that you will remove or invalidate your subjective
feelings about a work, in fact you will find that the more informed you
become, the more artwork will affect you emotionally and intellectually.
• It does mean that you will learn alternative ways to approach art, ways
that allow you to find clues to meaning and to understand how art reflects
and affects our lives.

It's complex, but the satisfaction of looking
at art comes from exploring the work to
find meaning, not shying away from it
because we may not initially understand it.

1. Which of the following would be a subjective response to an
artwork?
a) Understanding where and when it was made
b) Understanding who made it and why
c) Understanding your emotional response to it

2. Which of the following would be an objective response to an
artwork?
a) Ranking its quality compared to similar artworks
b) Interpreting it based on aesthetics or art history
c) Analyzing the primary compositional elements

Understanding Artistic Roles
WRT Visual Arts

A traditional role of visual art is to describe ourselves and our surroundings.
Some of the earliest artworks discovered are drawings and paintings of humans and wild animals on walls deep
within prehistoric caves.
Portraits, landscapes, and still life are common examples of description.

• Portraits capture the accuracy of physical characteristics but the very
best also transfer a sense of an individual’s unique personality.
• For thousands of years this role was reserved for images of those in
positions of power, influence and authority.
• The portrait not only signifies who they are, but also solidifies class
structure by presenting only the highest-ranking members of a society.

The portrait Bust of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, dated to
around 1300 BCE, exemplifies beauty and royalty.
The full-length Imperial Portrait of Chinese Emperor Xianfeng
not only shows realism in the likeness of the emperor, it exalts
in the patterns and colors of his robe and the throne behind
him

Landscapes
Landscapes, by themselves, give us detailed information about our natural and human made
surroundings; things like location, architecture, time of day, year or season plus other physical
information such as geological elements and the plants and animals within a particular region.

In many Western cultures, the
more realistic the rendering of a
scene the closer to our idea of
the ‘truth’ it becomes. In the
15th century, the German artist
Albrecht Dürer created vivid
works that show a keen sense of
observation. His Young
Hare from 1495 is uncanny in its
realism and sense of animation.

Out of this striving for accuracy and
documentation developed the art
of scientific illustration, an important
part of scientific communication
before the advent of photography.
Scientific illustrators concentrate on
accuracy and utility rather than
aesthetics and document many
different types of scientific
phenomenon.

Enhancing Our World
Art plays a role in our everyday lives. Art's role in enhancing our
lives is more utilitarian than others.
It includes textiles and product design, decorative embellishments
to the items we use everyday and all the aesthetic considerations
that create a more comfortable, expressive environment.

Can you point out five works of art,
in the utilitarian sense, in close
proximity to you right now?

1. What purpose did portraits originally serve?
a) They focused mainly on wealthy and powerful people
b) They always tried to accurately represent people
c) They captured daily people in their everyday lives

2. Which of the following do scientific illustrations
prioritize in their representations?
a) Accuracy
b) Aesthetics
c) Utility

Artistic Categories
Visual arts are generally divided into categories that make
distinctions based on the context of the work. For example, Leonardo
da Vinci’s Mona Lisa would not fall into the same category as, say, a
graphic poster for a rock concert. Some artworks can be placed in
more than one category.

This category includes drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs and, in the last decade, new media that are in
museum collections and sold through commercial art galleries.
Fine art has a distinction of being some of the finest examples of our human artistic heritage.
Here is where you will find Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, also ancient sculpture, such as the Gandhara Buddha from
India, and stunning ceramics from different cultures and time periods.
Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, c. 1503-19.
Oil on poplar. 30". The Louvre, Paris
Gandhara Buddha, India

• This category contains the many products and images we are exposed to
every day.
• In the industrialized world, this includes posters, graffiti, advertising,
popular music, television and digital imagery, magazines, books and movies
(as distinguished from film, which we will examine in a different context
later in the course).
• Also included are cars, celebrity status and all the ideas and attitudes that
help define the contemporary period of a particular culture.
• Handbills posted on telephone poles or the sides of buildings are graphic,
colorful and informative, but they also provide a street level texture to the
urban environment most of us live in.
• Public murals serve this same function. They put an aesthetic stamp on an
otherwise bland and industrialized landscape.

• Sometimes called "craft", this is a
category of art that shows a high
degree of skilled workmanship in
its production.
• Such works are normally
associated with utilitarian
purposes, but can be aesthetic
works in themselves.
• Handmade furniture and
glassware, fine metalworking and
leather goods are other examples
of decorative arts.

1. Which of the following would posters of cultural events
covering a city building's wall be an example of?
a) Popular art
b) Fine art
c) Decorative art

2. Which of the following would an expensive handbag that
you see in a shop window be an example of?
a) Popular art
b) Fine art
c) Decorative art

Cultural Styles
Cultural styles refer to distinctive characteristics in artworks throughout a particular
society or culture. Some main elements of cultural styles are recurring motifs,
created in the same way by many artists. Cultural styles are formed over hundreds or
even thousands of years and help define cultural identity.

We can find evidence of this by comparing two masks; one from Alaska and the other from Canada.
The Yup'ik dance mask from Alaska is quite stylized with oval
and rounded forms divided by wide bands in strong relief.
The painted areas outline or follow shapes. Carved objects
are attached to the mask and give an upward movement to
the whole artwork while the face itself carries an animated
expression.
By comparison, a Wolf Mask from the Tlingit culture in coastal
northwestern Canada exhibits similar forms and many of the
same motifs. The mouths of each mask are particularly similar
to each other. Wolf's visage takes on human-like characteristics
just as the Yup'ik mask takes the form of a bird. This cultural
style ranges from western Alaska to northern Canada.

Celtic art from Great Britain and Ireland
shows a cultural style that has been
identified for thousands of years.
Its highly refined organic motifs include
spirals, plant forms and zoomorphism.
Intricate and decorative, the Celtic style
adapted to include early book illustration.
The Book of Kells is considered the pinnacle
of this cultural style.

1. Which of the following statements about cultural styles in art is true?
a) They are hard to define because works of art are so different from each
other
b) They are usually short-lived trends that are quickly replaced by new
ones
c) They can be identified by motifs or recurring patterns

Representational, Abstract, and
Nonrepresentational Art

Representational (sometimes also called figurative
art, although it doesn't always contain figures)
Representational art or figurative art represents objects or events in
the real world, usually looking easily recognizable. For example, a
painting of a cat looks very much like a cat – it's quite obvious what
the artist is depicting

This figurative
or
representation
al work from
the
seventeenth
century depicts
easily
recognizable
objects–ships,
people, and
buildings.

Abstract art is based on imagery from the real world
Romanticism, Impressionism, and Expressionism contributed to the
emergence of abstract art in the nineteenth century as artists became
less interested in depicting things exactly like they really exist.
Abstract art exists on a continuum, from somewhat representational
work, to work that is so far removed from its actual real-world
appearance that it is almost impossible to easily discern what is being
represented.
Abstract art is always connected to something visual from the real
world.

Pablo Picasso, Girl Before a Mirror, 1932, MOMA
Artistic independence was advanced during the
nineteenth century, resulting in the emergence of
abstract art.
Three movements that contributed heavily to the
development of these were Romanticism,
Impressionism, and Expressionism.
Abstraction indicates a departure from reality in
depiction of imagery in art.
Abstraction exists along a continuum; abstract art
can formally refer to compositions that are derived
(or abstracted) from a figurative or other natural
source.
Picasso is a well-known artist who used abstraction
in many of his paintings and sculptures: figures are
often simplified, distorted, exaggerated, or
geometric.

Nonrepresentational (or non-objective) art
Work that does not depict anything from the real world
(figures, landscapes, animals, etc.) is
called nonrepresentational.
Nonrepresentational art may simply depict shapes,
colors, lines, etc., but may also express things that are
not visible – emotions or feelings for example.

Even art that aims for verisimilitude (accuracy and truthfulness) of the highest degree can be said to be abstract, at
least theoretically, since perfect representation is likely to be exceedingly elusive. Artwork which takes liberties,
altering for instance color and form in ways that are conspicuous, can be said to be partially abstract.
Robert Delaunay, Le Premier Disque, 1913
Delaunay's work is a primary example of
early nonrepresentational art, bearing no
trace of any reference to anything
recognizable from the real world.
In nonrepresentational art, for instance,
one is unlikely to find references to
naturalistic entities.
Figurative art and nonrepresentational art
are almost mutually exclusive.

Select any 5 objects around you where you find art.
Now substantiate them with following aspects:
1. Artistic Role: Descriptive(Landscape, Portraits etc.);
Utilitarian; realism; Scientific Illustration
2. Artistic Category: Fine Art, Pop Art, Decorative art
3. Cultural Reference
4. Representational, Non-representational or Abstract Art

1.Description: A work of art from an objective point of view – its physical
attributes and formal construction.
2.Analysis: A detailed look at a work of art that combines physical
attributes with subjective statements based on the viewer's reaction to the
work.
3.Context: Historical, religious or environmental information that
surrounds a particular work of art and which helps to understand the
work's meaning.
4.Meaning: A statement of the work's content. A message or narrative
expressed by the subject matter.
5.Judgment: A critical point of view about a work of art concerning its
aesthetic or cultural value.

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