Week 8 Art Notes
How to do Visual Analysis in Art History
How Not to do Visual Analysis in Art History
Talking about the Iconography/Symbolism, or how this painting fits in with the history of paintings.
Talk about Symbolism of things like animals in a background.
Talk about the commission or who the patron/s of the painting was.
Talk about the political, social or economic context.
Scale - Scale of the painting and the figures in the painting. Small paintings you must go closer and large paintings you must be farther away from the painting.
Composition - Composition of the painting consists of what are the different layers within the painting such as what different areas of style that we can see
Pictorial Space - This means the sense of space created within the painting so things farther away are seen as smaller
Form - Form means the representation of the solids in the space such as architecture or natural occurring structures such as mountains or trees.
Line - Contour Lines are used to separate a form or an edge seen often as the corners of form.
Color
Light - Light is the function of color
Tone - Lightness or Darkness of a color
Texture - The visual and tactile color of quality of a surface.
Pattern - Often a repeated decorative design.
Elements of Art: Line
Line is one of the seven elements of art.
Line is the path created when an object moves from one path to another.
Lines can be made in most works of art and can be horizontal vertical or diagonal, continuous, curved or straight are all at once.
Could be described as bold or jagged, or faint and clean.
Elements of Art: Texture
Texture is the look or feel of a surface, just like form texture can be real or implied.
Actual Texture is the literal feeling of something like a sculpture.
Implied texture are only textures that a visual so a painting or illustration.
Repeating shapes can be used to create texture.
Elements of Art: Space
Space is the area in which an artwork is organized
it can be counted at the artwork itself, the area within the art or the artwork that is outside the art.
Positive space is the area the object actually occupy
Negative space is the space in and throughout the artwork