What is Art

What is art?
How does art influence society?
Why is art important?
What are the elements of art
What are different types of art?
WE WILL ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS

What is art?
Art can be framed as a human propensity for "goal directed play," with
the intent of "making objects special," and supporting a culture's
ceremonies.
There are probably as many opinions on art as there are art critics.
Inviting creative professionals in online social network communities to
share their opinions provided some qualified insights. Аrt was seen as:
"The expression of the thoughts of the artist are successful when it engages both the maker and the viewer and creates dialogs of wonder. It is subjective and stimulating end seeks to enlighten and entertain."
"Art adapts to and reflects the values of the time, by speaking the language of the patron and by adjusting to the consensus of the most successful styles of the period. Which, at the moment, happens to be design."
"Art and design are inextricably linked."

How does art influence society?
It is believed that art influence people's ideas, thoughts, and maybe even there action. Art has a big influence on peoples life. It inspires people in many ways. Art can influence peoples moods too.
Art, whether it's consumed in a theater, museum, gallery or store, often influences people to become artists and create art themselves. Art can serve as inspiration to awaken the imagination, talent and skill hiding in someone. It can unlock your fears and insecurities about creating and push you toward picking up a paintbrush or a camera. Art can ignite the passion to create something of beauty and importance, to be included in the community of artists who've inspired you and contribute to that which you find inspiring.

Why is art important?
The arts are a powerful vehicle for communication, a way to express visions that are beyond the capacity of words and a medium for cultural enlightenment. Knowledge of the arts is an indispensable foundation for enlightened citizenship in our increasingly complicated world.
The responses of artists to the events of 9/11 are just one reminder of the essential role that the arts play in exploring the emotional dimensions of experience, in shaping the way people talk about critical issues and in formulating visions of the future, both for artists and their audiences.

Elements Of Art
Unlocking and Discovering the Key Building Blocks of Art
*Line
*Value
*Shape
*Form
*Color
*Texture
*Space
Henri Matisse. Interior with Egyptian Curtain 1948. Oil Painting

Line
When you, as a child, first picked up a crayon, a line might have been the first mark you made. You use lines to write numbers, symbols, and the letter of the alphabet. You use lines to draw pictures. Lines are everywhere. In drawing, line is an element of art that is the path of a moving point through space.
What type of lines do you see around you?

Artists use line to lead your eyes around a work of art. This is because the artist wants to lead you through their composition. Line creates movement, and leads your eye into, around, and out of visual images as in this painting by Yvonne Jacquette. Oil, 1988
Notice how the artist uses the line of the highway to pull your eyes into the artwork.
Line has width as well as length, but usually the width of the line is smaller than the length.
Artists create lines in many different ways. A line can be drawn on a paper with pencil or scratched in clay with a stick.

Some lines that we think we see in nature really do not exist. For instance, when you look at the edges of shapes, you think of lines. In the photo of the dogwood blossom, notice that there are no black lines around the flower, only black against white. However in a sketch of the same blossom, lines are used to define the shape of the flower.

Value
Value is the element of art that describes the darkness or lightness of an object. Value depends on how much light a surface reflects. A surface has a dark value if it reflects little light. It has a light value if it reflects a lot of light. Every time you make a mark with a pencil, you are creating a line with a certain value. The harder you press, the darker the value. A series of closely placed lines can create areas of dark value. (Also known as crosshatching)
Albrecht Durer. An Original Ruler Seated On a Throne. 1445. Pen and Ink

Value Bar. Various shades from white to black

Shapes and Form
All objects are either shapes or forms, whether they are rocks, puddles, flowers, shirts, houses, whatever. The words shapes and forms are used interchangeably in everyday language, but in art, they mean very different things.
A shape is a two dimensional area that is defined in some way. In other words, it may have an outline or a boundary around it. If you draw the outline of a square on a sheet of paper, you have created a shape. All shapes can be classified as geometric or free form shapes.
There are three basic geometric shapes that can be defined with precise mathematical formulas.
square
circle
triangle

COLOR
Wassily Kandinsky Tension in Red 1926 oil
COLOR

Color
Color is the most expressive element of art. It shares a powerful connection with emotion. Color can be a strong clue to an artists symbolism, or meaning behind an artwork. Color can represent many different feelings or ideas. Black can stand for mystery or evil, white can mean purity or innocence. Red stands for love, passion, hunger, or violence, green is meditative, calming, while blue is the symbol for power, or royalty.
A prison system in North Carolina decided they would attempt to reduce violent behavior within the prison by painting the prison with the color pink. After consulting a color specialist, it was decided that since pink is a feminine color, and females have less incidents of violence, pink would be a good color for their facilities. After a few months the rate of violence steadily increased. Prison officials were left scratching their heads…what went wrong? Another color specialist was consulted, and it was quickly discovered that pink is a variation of red, which is the color of passion, and now the prison is a nice off white.
Color is the element of art that is derived from reflective light. You see color because light waves are reflected from objects to your eyes.

Hue
Hue is the name of a color in its true form. Red, blue, and yellow are called primary colors. You cannot make primary hues by mixing other hues together, however, by mixing black, white, or a combination of primary colors, you can make any other color in the spectrum.
Primary colors
Secondary colors are made by mixing two primary colors.
Red and yellow
Yellow and Blue
Red and blue
orange
Green
Violet

Color Wheel
A color wheel is the spectrum bent into a circle. It is a useful tool for organizing colors.
There are yet another group of six colors called intermediate, or tertiary colors. These are made by mixing a primary color with a secondary colors
These colors include yellow green, yellow orange, red orange, blue green, blue violet, red violet. Always list the primary color first when referring to a tertiary color.

Texture
Jesus Bautista Moroles Granite Weaving Playscape 1995 granite
Everything you touch has its own special feel, or texture. As an element of art, texture may be real, or implied or suggested, like in a photograph, or in a painting.
Texture is the element of art that refers to how things feel, or look as if they might feel, if touched. You perceive texture with two of your senses; touch and vision. Infants learn about their environment by touching objects and by putting them in their mouths. Toddlers are attracted to all objects that are within their reach. When you look at surfaces, you are able to guess their texture because you have learned how textures feel.

Janet Fish Oranges 1973 Pastel on Sandpaper
Janet Fish used pastels to create visual textures in this work. In some areas she has combined different kinds of visual textures, such as shiny-rough, and shiny smooth, and matte smooth.

Space
Space refers to both outer space and inner space. Rockets move through outer space to explore other planets. People move through the inner space of rooms and buildings. Space can be flat and two dimensional, such as the space of a widow. Space can also be three dimensional, such as the space filled with water in a swimming pool.
Shapes and forms exist in space. Space is the element of art that refers to the emptiness or area between, around, above, below, or within objects. All objects take up space. You for example, are a living breathing form moving through space.
Shapes and forms are defined by the space around and within them. They depend on space for their existence. This is why it is important to understand the relationship of space to shapes and form.

Positive and Negative Space
In both two and three dimensional art, the shapes or forms are called the positive space or the figure. The empty space between the forms are called negative space or ground. In the next slide, Jasper Johns uses a play one positive negative space. Are the faces or the vase the positive or negative?

Jasper Johns Cups 4 Picasso 1972 Lithograph.
Do you see a vase or do you see profiles of Pablo Picasso. Jasper Johns has deliberately organized this work as a visual puzzle to confuse the viewer. One minute the faces are very clear and seem to be the figure, while the space between the profiles is the ground. The next moment the vase becomes figure and the space around the vase becomes the ground.

Types of Art
And Media Used

2-Dimensional Art
2-Dimensional art is any art that has length and width, but no depth.
Paintings, Drawings, Etchings,
Scratchboard, Photography, Graphic Design
work (ads, etc.)

Drawing
Intimate form of art in that it is frequently the artist’s private note-taking process.
Sketching, doodling, Intricate drawing
Leonardo da Vinci created hundreds of sketches of paintings, sculptures, inventions, stories, mathematics, science, and more

Dry Media
Pencil
Graphite Pencil
Cheap, readily available, easily erased
All art begins with an idea and a sketch

Dry Media
Metalpoint
Not used a lot anymore (not forgiving in mistakes)
Process: thin wire of metal (usually silver) in a holding device scratches lines onto a drawing surface specially coated with paint.
Much like scratchboard.
Use thin, delicate lines with hatching and cross-hatching

Dry Media
Charcoal
Very dark, sometimes harsh value and line
Made by burning sticks of wood.
Smears easily to produce subtle values.

Dry Media
Chalk Pastels
Pigment and nonfat binders
Blend better and can be overlaid to produce shaded effects
Very messy and often require a sealant when finished (fixative or varnish).

Dry Media
Oil Pastels and Crayons
Pigment and fatty or greasy binders
Adhere better to the drawing paper
Much more difficult to blend
Wider variety of colors
Crayons can be wax crayons (kids use) or crayon used to draw on lithography stone, or conté crayon (a little greasier than chalk coming in red, black, and brown colors).

Liquid Media
Pen and Ink
Can have variety of line width depending on tip of pen.
Also used for writing
Asian calligraphy artists
Favored by and readily available to Rembrandt
Made thousands of pen and ink sketches

Liquid Media
Brush and Ink
Often used in the East for writing purposes
Broader, more intense lines than pen and ink

Digital Drawing
Computer based drawing
Faster, easier drawing (can be erased and reworked easier)
Less realistic often times
More colors, brush and pen sizes, and drawing “canvas” available.
Can be saved forever
Paint program, Adobe Illustrator

Architecture & Engineering
Uses programs to create building and structure plans
Several different programs available
AutoCad (85% engineering firms use), Cad Pipe (draws ductwork in 3-D), Pro-E (3-D drawing for assembly of industrial and manufacturing—easy to modify), MicroStation (often used by government—works with AutoCad program well)

Architectural Drawings

Painting
Most commonly associated with “art”
Uses full spectrum of colors
Framed to make them more exciting and give them an impression of being “precious”
Used in prehistoric days with cave paintings
Watercolor, tempera, acrylic, oil, gouache, impasto, fresco

Materials
Made of pigment like drawing tools
Pigment is mixed with a vehicle (a liquid that holds the particles of pigment together without dissolving them)
Vehicle works as a binder to keep pigment on paper or canvas.
Support – the canvas, paper, wood panel, wall, or other surface that is painted on

Encaustic
Pigment mixed with wax and resin
Must be heated to paint on easily.
Paint hardens when cools.
Used mainly by Roman and Greek artists.

Fresco
Pigments mixed with water and applied to a plaster support (usually wet also)
Wall-painting technique often used for large scale murals
Works are guided by a full sized dot drawing called a cartoon.
When ready to paint, the artist simply connects the dots.

Tempera
Made with water and pigment
Bright colors that last longer than oil paint
Can be mixed with egg yolk to make it thicker and not crack.
Tempera is often used to paint on wood panels with a base of gesso
Gesso – Base paint mixed with glue that helps paint stay on a support

Oil Paint
Pigment mixed with oil—usually linseed.
First used on wooden panels and then graduated to flexible canvas.
Used on large, bold projects
Dries VERY slowly
Colors can be blended subtly and areas can be reworked easily
Sometimes takes weeks or months to dry
Paint can become “muddy” from mixing colors and paint too much

Oil Paint
Alla Prima – Spontaneous painting approach (Italian for “all on the go”)

Oil Paint
Impasto – Thick, layered paint
Creates an interesting texture

Watercolor
Pigment with water and gum arabic
Mostly used on paper
Mainly used for small, intimate works
Transparency is the desired characteristic
White of the paper serves as the white color – white paint not really needed.
Wash – translucent, watered down paint spread across the support.

Watercolor

Watercolor

Gouache
Watercolor with white inert pigment added
Inert pigment – pigment that becomes colorless in paint.
Allows colors to be completely opaque and will hide anything they are painted over.
Similar to poster paint
Dries very quickly and uniformly

Gouache

Acrylic
Synthetic artist color, also called polymer
Made of acrylic resin, polymerized through emulsions in water
Can mimic the effects of oil, watercolor, tempera, and gouache paints.
Dry quickly and permanently
Usually keep brush in water while painting so they do not dry out.

Acrylic

Acrylic

Collage
French word that means “pasting” or “gluing”
Attaching actual objects to the surface of a support
Objects can be paper, cloth, or anything
Drawing or painting can be incorporated, also

Collage
Pablo Picasso
Paper, Gouache, and Charcoal

Collage
Henri Matisse – Famous painter who was diagnosed with cancer at age 78
Couldn’t paint anymore, so made collages

Matisse Collage

Questions

The Peasant Dance, Pieter Bruegel the Elder
What are some of the elements seen here?

What are some of the elements seen here?

Image #1
Is this art? Why or why not? What elements does it have or not have?

Image #3
Is this art? Why or why not? What elements does it have or not have?

Image #4
Is this art? Why or why not? What elements does it have or not have?