Visual Vocabulary

Our 2nd lecture on 26th September (Mean Fomhair) 2013 was thankfully half an hour later and will be from now on...phew! It would have been tricky to find a way to do all the school runs and get across town to the Dublin Road building for 9 am every week (v.busy traffic wise).  
So a more relaxed group of us settled into this lecture on visual vocabulary.  The visual qualities of every work of art and design are the result of the specific ways in which the creator has used the 'formal elements' of line, shape, space, texture and colour.
 more to follow......................... gremlin re pictures again

First Art History Tutorial.....

As mentioned in the previous post this really is a vast subject.  I forgot to mention that in the first lecture we also watched a bit of the BBC series 'How Art Made The World' with Dr Nigel Spivey.  It was the first episode 'More Human Than Human' and was covering the realism aspect of people portrayed through art across the centuries. The distinctive features portrayed in 2 and 3 D art such as in Egyptian art the way that the people are usually portrayed in profile.

Our tutorial followed the lecture we covered some key terms in our smaller groups.  The first being'criterion' which is to do with standard and can be a basis for comparison.  For example hotels get awarded their stars based on certain criteria.
The next term 'evaluation' which means to asses or appraise.

We talked about tradition in art and how it is important to understand previous art movements to fully appreciate the production of subsequent artworks.  Artists influences is another aspect of this for example Le déjeuner sur l'herbe by Manet which caused controversy at the time (in 1863).  

 So Manet obviously studied the old masters as his composition is a cheekily reworked copy of a Raphael composition.  If you look the engraving below created by Marcantonio Raimondi from a design by Raphael Sanzio in 1510-1520 called  The Judgement Of Paris you can spot the 3 main characters posing together.

 Of course not all art has this kind of historical background story ; but most does have influences, connections and inspirations from what has gone before and this can be interesting to look at.  It may or may not then convey a deeper 'message'.  From the above we could not only study Manet's work of the time and it's meaning; but also look at Raphael's and what it may have meant at the time.  

Also in this example the piece has been further 'played with' and used by other artists.  For example Pablo Picasso seemed very inspired by the figures and did many paintings and drawings entitled  Le déjeuner sur l'herbe such as this one to a friend, Norman Granz, in 1969.

We then were asked about present day (contemporary) artists that we liked and their work and we looked at a few to see if we could spot where there visual influences had come from.  We discussed connections we could see with other pieces and other artists...this was an interesting exercise to do and I will explorer this more in a later blog.  The discussion included artists Ernesto Neto, Janet Echelman, Hans R Giger and Michelangelo Caravaggio..a good start!

 

The huge subject of....!

I intended to start this blog to run alongside my art history classes, which are part of my Art and Design degree; but it was just far to crazy.  So what better way to revise than to blog about it?!

Our lecturer for art history the first semester was Marion McEnroy-Higgins.

Art history really is such a vast subject and we were also looking at architecture and authors so you can imagine!

Our first lecture was to do with methods of looking at art and we were given a handout of an extract from a book by Susan Woodford called 'Looking at Pictures' published by Cambridge University Press, 1983.  We can look at art and ask ourselves about the purpose for which is was created i.e to tell a story, decoration etc.  We can then go on to ask what can we find out about the culture of the time from the piece?  If realism is a relevant, how realistic is it? and how is it composed or designed in terms of it's formal elements?

So as an example:

This cave painting of hyenas found in the Chauvet cave in France and thought to be 30,000 years old, what purpose did this art serve?  Well of course that's quite a big question in itself because we don't have a definitive answer on it. It could have been for magical purposes, for pleasure, for information...looking at the many cave paintings available to see now I love their depictions of animals and people, the movement and earthy colours; but they maybe did serve other purposes.  What does it tell us about the culture?..it indicates a dwelling in and around these caves, a community and a strong connection with what was around them. They are pretty realistic, if they were for identification purposes of species of animals you would be able to make them out; probably not for individual animals/people though.  How it is composed in terms of formal design I may not have the full means to describe yet; but giving it a go...the design is composed to fill that space and gives a sense of balance and harmony.  One animal seems to interact with the other.  The colour seems dependent on the limit of pigment available to the artist; but the line and texture created is very descriptive.  The pattern on the animals is probably there to try to show actual animal markings.  I'm not sure from looking at the photo of the scale or whether the artist was showing a parent and young hyena or distance, to me from the body language it seems more like the parent and young.

A photo of a modern day hyena:

After each art history lecture I have an art history tutorial, so I will be commenting on that next post......