Elements of Art or Elements of Design - The basic components used by the artist when producing works of art. Those elements are color, value, line, shape, form, texture, and space. The elements of art are among the literal qualities found in any artwork.

COLORProduced by light of various wavelengths, and when light strikes an object and reflects back to the eyes.

An element of art with three properties: (1) hue or tint, the color name, e.g., red, yellow, blue, etc.: (2) intensity, the purity and strength of a color, e.g., bright red or dull red; and (3) value, the lightness or darkness of a color.

When the spectrum is organized as a color wheel, the colors are divided into groups called primary, secondary and intermediate (or tertiary) colors; analogous and complementary, and also as warm and cool colors.

Colors can be objectively described as saturated, clear, cool, warm, deep, subdued, grayed, tawny, mat, glossy, monochrome, multicolored, particolored, variegated, or polychromed.

Some words used to describe colors are more subjective (subject to personal opinion or taste), such as: exciting, sweet, saccharine, brash, garish, ugly, beautiful, cute, fashionable, pretty, and sublime.

Sometimes people speak of colors when they are actually refering to pigments, what they are made of (various natural or synthetic substances), their relative permanence, etc.

Photographers measure color temperature in degrees kelvin (K).

VALUEAn element of art that refers to luminance or luminosity — the lightness or darkness of a color. This is important in any polychromatic image, but it can be more apparent when an image is monochromatic, as in many drawings, woodcuts, lithographs, and photographs. This is commonly the case in much sculpture and architecture too.

Below: a value scale employing a smoothly nuanced gradation of values.

Below: a value scale — or gray scale — in eight stepped grades of value

And another stepped scale produced by hatching and cross-hatching.

Below: another value scale — or gray scale — in which stepped grades of values are labeled for their percentages of black, and values used to give planar shapes greater solidity and depth.

A full range of values can also be produced by a variety of other means. These include hatching and stipple techniques, as well as with textures and patterns of other sorts.

The following illustration diagrams colors of various values. Value changes from pure hues are called shades and tints. On the right, pure hues are marked by dots. Notice how their values — their positions beside the gray scale — are varied.

Changes in value, whether sudden or gradual, can add greatly to the visual impact of art forms. Changes in value can also be used to help the artist express an idea.

LINELine - A mark with length and direction(-s). An element of art which refers to the continuous mark made on some surface by a moving point. Types of line include: vertical, horizontal, diagonal, straight or ruled, curved, bent, angular, thin, thick or wide, interrupted (dotted, dashed, broken, etc.), blurred or fuzzy, controlled, freehand, parallel, hatching, meandering, and spiraling. Often it defines a space, and may create an outline or contour, define a silhouette; create patterns, or movement, and the illusion of mass or volume. It may be two-dimensional (as with pencil on paper) three-dimensional (as with wire) or implied (the edge of a shape or form).

Examples:

 

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669), Two Studies of a Bird of Paradise, pen and sepia ink and wash, white highlights, 0.181 x 0.155 m, Louvre. See nature.

 

 

 

James Thurber (American, 1894-1961), All Right, Have It Your Way — You Heard a Seal Bark, c. 1937, pen and ink on paper. See contour line drawing.

 

 

 Richard Long (English,1945-), A Line Made by Walking, 1967, photograph and pencil on board, image: 37.5 x 32.4 cm, Tate Gallery, London. Long created this earth work by walking back and forth along the same line in a grassy field in Somerset, England, wearing away a thin path, which lasted until the grass grew back again. Long took this photo of his work in order to document it.

Quotes:

• "It is to be observed that straight lines vary only in length, and therefore are least ornamental. That curv'd lines as they can be varied in their degrees of curvature as well as in their length, begin on that account to be ornamental. That straight and curv'd lines joined, being a compound line, vary more than curves alone, and so become somewhat more ornamental. That the waving line, or line of beauty, varying still more, being composed of two curves contrasted, becomes still more ornamental and pleasing . . . and that the serpentine line, or line of grace, by its waving and winding at the same time different ways, leads the eye in a pleasing manner along the continuity of its variety."William Hogarth (1697-1764), English painter. The Analysis of Beauty.

• "Art, like morality, consists in drawing a line somewhere."G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), English author.

• "As in the fourteen lines of a sonnet, a few strokes of the pencil can hold immensity."Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970), English. The Magic of a Line.

Gustav Klimt,(Austrian, 1862-1918),Tree of Life, Stoclet Frieze, 1905-1911, oil and gold leaf on canvas.

 

Linear - A painting technique in which importance is placed on contours or outlines.

Examples of paintings done in this manner:

 

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Sofa, oil on cardboard, 24 3/4 x 31 7/8 inches (62.9 x 81 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. See Post-Impressionism.

 

 

Paul Klee (German, 1879-1940, born and died in Switzerland), The Mocker Mocked (Oder der verspottete Spötter), 1930, oil on canvas, 17 x 20 5/8 inches (43.2 x 52.4 cm), Museum of Modern Art, NY. See Bauhaus.

 

 

Stuart Davis (American, 1892-1964), New York-Paris no.2, 1931, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 40 1/4 inches, Portland Art Museum, ME. See New Deal art.

 

 

Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1977), Little Big Painting, 1965, oil on canvas, 68 x 80 inches (172.7 x 203.2 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. This painting humorously toys with the idea of making the brushstroke visible: depicting a giant linear brushstroke, using the style of mass-produced cartoons. See Pop Art.

Linear perspective

A system of drawing or painting in which the artist attempts to create the illusion of spatial depth on a two-dimensional surface. It works by following consistent geometric rules for rendering objects as they appear to the human eye. For instance, we see parallel lines as converging in the distance, although in reality they do not. Stated another way, the lines of buildings and other objects in a picture are slanted inward making them appear to extend back into space. If lengthened these lines will meet at a point along an imaginary horizontal line representing the eye level. Each such imaginary line is called an orthogonal. The point at which such lines meet is called a vanishing point.

The invention of linear perspective dates to the early 1400s, with Filippo Brunelleschi's experiments in perspective painting and Leon Battista Alberti's treatise on perspective theory.

Examples of pictures employing linear perspective:

 Paolo Uccello (born Paolo di Dono) (Italian, 1397-1475), Perspective Study of a Chalice, pen and ink on paper, 29 x 24.5 cm, Gabinetto dei Disegni, Uffizi, Florence. See Renaissance and wireframe.

Albrecht Altdorfer (German, c. 1480-1538), The Entrance Hall of the Regensburg Synagogue, 1519, etching, 6 1/4 x 4 3/8 inches (15.9 x 11.1 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. See Northern Renaissance

Fra Giovanni da Verona (Italian), three panels of wood intarsia, 1520: Each conveys the appearance of open cupboard doors — a trompe l'oeil effect resulting from the use of linear perspective. The first panel: a Campanus sphere, a mazzocchio, and various instruments of the geometer.

The second panel: a complex polyhedron which can be constructed by erecting a pyramid of equilateral triangles on each face of an icosidodecahedron.

The third: the Campanus sphere again, along with an icosahedron and a truncated icosahedron.

Hieronymus Rodler (German, d. 1539), Zu eynem Gewelb/so du off die art haben willt . . . (A vault the way you'd like it),1531, woodcut, 8 1/2 x 5 5/8 inches, from Hieronymus Rodler, Eyn schön nützlich Büchlin vnd Vnderweisung der Kunst des Messens mit dem Zirckel. Siemeren, 1531, leaf D2, Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA.

Tommaso Laureti (Italian, 1530-1602), Design for a portion of an illusionistic ceiling, 1583, engraving, 8 3/8 x 12 5/8 inches, From Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, Le due regole della prospettiva pratica, Rome, 1583, p. 88, Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA.

Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853-1890), A Corridor in the Asylum, late May or June, 1889, black chalk and gouache on pink Ingres paper, 25 5/8 x 19 5/16 inches (65.1 x 49.1 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. See Post-Impressionism

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965), The Road West, 1938, depicted: United States of America, gelatin silver print, 17.3 x 24 cm (6 13/16 x 9 7/16 inches), Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. See photography.

Maurits Cornelis Escher (Dutch, 1898-1972), Belvedere, 1958, lithograph, 8 1/4 x 11 5/8 inches (462 x 295 mm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. This belvedere has three stories, but its drawing results in an optical illusion. Escher has employed a hybrid of linear perspective that produces a mixture of two possibilities. Note how the pillars connect the second to the third story.

Robert Longo (American, contemporary), Tongue to the Heart, 1984, acrylic and oil on wood panel, cast plaster, hammered lead on wood, Durotran, and acrylic on canvas, 136 x 216 x 25 inches, Eli Broad Foundation.

Irregular applications of linear perspective have resulted in various optical illusions and anamorphosis.

optical illusion - An image that deceives a person, leading to a misinterpretation of its meaning. Optical illusions can be found in nature as well as in art. Their strengths rely upon various assumptions in which humans perceive optical phenomena.

There are several classic optical illusions. One is an alternating figure variously called a magic cube or a Necker cube (Louis Necker, a Swiss crystallographer, first published his analysis of this design in 1832): the wireframe cube below. Which of its sides is nearest to you? Is it the one made solidly green on the cube to the left or is it the green side on the cube to the right, or is there no nearest side at all?

More people interpret a magic cube as the one on the left than the one on the right. The most likely reason seems to be that people see boxes more often from above than from below.

Here is an "impossible" version pictured with a high degree of realism. The two points where the linear edges must overlap have been purposely confused. The resulting figure produces an even more jarring figure-ground dilemma, likely to be interpretted as humorous or upsetting.

Here's another classic, known as the Muller-Lyer illusion. Which of the horizontal lines is longer?

Measure them. You may be surprised to learn that they are the same length. Our tendency to misjudge the length of such lines (as with our tendency to be confused by magic cubes) stems from experiences which have "taught" us to use certain shapes and angles to tell us about size and placement. Such experiences established the conventions of linear perspective.

How many black dots can you count?

The illusory black dots you see are afterimages. This gridded figure is known as a "Hermann grid," named after its designer. L. Hermann visualized it in 1870, while reading a book about sound.

Here is a very active radial design that relies upon afterimages.

Other optical illusions rely upon our experience of stereoscopic vision -- 3-D movies for instance.

More examples:

Germany, Young Woman / Old Woman, 1888, postcard. This is the earliest known form of an image that has been reworked many times since. Deriving meaning from this ambiguous or alternating figure depends on which picture elements the eye perceives most strongly -- one at a time -- not simultaneously.

Ill-Fated Lovers, c. 1890-1920. Here is another ambiguous or

alternating figure.

Marcel Duchamp (French-American, 1887-1968), Rotorelief (Optical Discs), 1935-1953, two editions, two circular discs magnetized 1 inch and 2 inch dark borders, drawings on 6 discs, both sides 7 7/8 inch diameter, casing 14 3/4 x 14 3/4 inches. When viewed (preferably with one eye) at a rotating speed of 40-60 rpm, the disks present an optical illusion of depth, and in a few cases, of three-dimensional objects: a fishbowl a light bulb, and a balloon. Also see Dada.

Maurits Cornelis Escher (Dutch, 1898-1972), Balcony, 1945, lithograph, 11 3/4 x 9 1/4 inches (29.7 x 23.4 cm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. In the center of this picture of a hillside town, Escher said he tried to break up the paper's flatness by "pretend[ing] to give it a blow with my fist at the back, but . . . the paper remains flat, and I have only created the illusion of an illusion."

Maurits Cornelis Escher, Up and Down, 1947, lithograph, 19 3/4 x 8 1/8 inches (50.3 x 20.5 cm).

Maurits Cornelis Escher, Relativity, 1953, lithograph, 11 1/8 x 11 5/8 inches (282 x 294 mm), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Here three worlds, each with their own gravitational forces exist simultaneously, operating perpendicularly to one other.

Maurits Cornelis Escher, Belvedere, 1958, lithograph, 8 1/4 x 11 5/8 inches (462 x 295 mm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. This belvedere has three stories, but its drawing results in an optical illusion. Escher has employed a hybrid of linear perspective that produces a mixture of two possibilities. Note how the pillars connect the second to the third story.

Three designs that rely on afterimages to produce illusions of movement:

Turning cylinders.

A rotary motion.

A push-and-pull in troughs.

anamorphosis and anamorphic art -

An image that appears distorted, because it is constructed on an elongated grid, rendering it unintelligible until it is viewed from a specific, extremely oblique point of view or reflected in a curved mirror, or with some other optical device. "Anamorphosis" is a Greek word meaning transformation, or more literally "formed again." Road signs such as "SCHOOL CROSSWALK" and directional arrows are designed anamorphically — stretched out — when painted on pavement, so that these signs are easily understood by the drivers who must view them obliquely. Do not confuse anamorphosis with metamorphosis.

Hans Holbein (German, 1497/8-1543), The Ambassadors, oil. A human skull in the lower third of the painting can be seen undistorted only from a viewpoint that is near and below the painting, and to its left. See vanitas.

Follower of Caravaggio, anamorphic Saint Jerome Praying, 1635, oil on canvas.

Erhard Schön (German, 1691-1742), Distortion, 1538. Immediately one sees on the left four people in a room, and an odd landscape to the right. Viewing this picture obliquely from its right reveals the anamorphic image of an embracing couple.

In photography, an anamorphic lens is capable of compressing a wide angle of view onto a standard frame of film. A similar projection system can be used to reform such an image onto a wide screen. Holywood movie company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer devised an anamorphic lens system in 1957 for 35mm film with a compression ratio of 1.25:1, that is sometimes called "M-G-M Camera 65" and sometimes "Ultra Panavision." The system employed a pair of achromatized Brewster prisms in order to expand a projected image anamorphically, and was first used for the films Raintree County and Ben-Hur.

SHAPEShape - An element of art, it is an enclosed space defined and determined by other art elements such as line, color, value, and texture. In painting and drawing, shapes may take on the appearance of solid three-dimensional object even though they are limited to two dimensions — length and width. This two-dimensional character of shape distinguishes it from form, which has depth as well as length and width.

Examples of shapes include: circle, oval, and oblong; polygons such as triangle, square, rectangle, rhombus, trapezium, trapezoid, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, nonagon, decagon, undecagon, dodecagon, etc.; and such other kinds of shapes as amorphous, biomorphous, and concretion.

circle - A round, two-dimensional shape in which every point on the outside is the same distance from the center. The curve of every segment of its edge is the same as every other. Note the similarity and difference between a circle and an ellipse.

When used in attributing a work of art, "the circle of" is a group of artists who shared with the artist named the style of the work, and implies a shared geographic origin and close dates for that group.

When the distance from the center to the outside of a circle is its radius (half its width), and its width is its diameter, the circumference (or perimeter) of a circle equals two times radius times pi (3.14159), or diameter times pi. The area of a circle equals pi times radius squared, or pi times diameter squared divided by 4, or 0.78539 times diameter squared.

A painting within a circle may be called a tondo in Western tradition, and a mandala in Eastern tradition. Each of these are likely to employ radial balance.

Examples of works in which this shape is important:

England, Salisbury Plain, Stonehenge, c. 2,500-1,500 BCE, stone, 162 inches high, a Stone Age monumental stone temple / observatory located 330 feet above sea level on the chalk downland of Salisbury Plain, about 80 miles west of London near the town of Amesbury. Also see circle, dolmen, megalith, menhir, and monolith.

 

Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) (Italian, 1483-1520), Madonna and Child (Madonna Conestabile), 1502/3, tempera on canvas (transferred from panel), 7 x 7 inches (17.5 x 18 cm), State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. See tondo.

 

 René Jules Lalique (French, 1860-1945), Necklace, c. 1895-1905, gold, enamel, Australian opal, Siberian amethysts; overall diameter 9 1/2 inches (24.1 cm); 9 large pendants: 2 3/4 x 2 1/4 inches (7 x 5.7 cm), 9 small pendants: 1 3/8 x 1 1/4 inches (3.5 x 3.2 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. See Art Nouveau and jewelry.

 

Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (American, 1867-1959), manufactured by F. Schumacher and Company, New York, Length of Printed Fabric, 1955, silk, printed, Fortisan (?), 88 x 49 3/4 inches (223.5 x 126.4 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. See architect, architecture, and textile.

 

 

Robert Delaunay (French, 1885-1941), Disks, 1930-33, oil on canvas, 88.3 x 124.5 cm, Museum of Modern Art, NY. See Orphism.

Sven Wingquist, designer, manufacturer: SKF Industries, Inc., USA, Self-Aligning Ball Bearing, 1929, chrome-plated steel, 1 3/4 x 8 1/2 inches (4.4 x 21.6 cm) diameter, Museum of Modern Art, NY. MOMA's site says, "Good design was considered by modernists as essential to the elevation of society, and in 1934, this ball bearing was among the first works to enter The Museum of Modern Art's design collection." See design and technology.

 

 

Jasper Johns (American, 1930-), Target with Four Faces, 1955, assemblage: encaustic and collage on canvas with objects, 26 x 26 inches. The circles in the target are "concentric" — meaning they all have the same point as their center. See Pop Art.

 

 

 Coca Cola advertising sign, 20th century, enamel on steel. See icon and logo.

 

 

  Sol LeWitt (American, 1928-), Untitled, 2001, linoleum cut, 30 x 30 inches, edition of 100. See conceptual art and Minimalism.

 

 

Michael Todd (American, 1935-), Daimaru X, 1978, lacquered steel, 137 1/2 x 131 1/4 x 40 inches, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, U of Nebraska, Lincoln. "Daimaru" is a Japanese word that means "big circle."

Robert Smithson (American, 1938-1973), Broken Circle, Emmen, Holland, 1971, green water, white and yellow sand flats, diameter 140 feet, canal approximately 12 feet wide, depth of the quarry lake 10 to 15 feet. See earth art.

 

Richard Long (English, 1945-), A Hundred Mile Walk, 1971-2, pencil, map, printed text, photographs and labels on board, 21.6 x 48.3 cm, Tate Gallery, London. All of Long's work results from solitary walks he has undertaken in different parts of the world. This work documents the circular route he took on a walk made in December and January of 1971-2, by means of a map showing his location, a photograph of part of the landscape passed through and phrases recording his thoughts and reactions. See earth art and line.

 

Richard Long (English, 1945-), Small White Pebble Circles, 1987, marble pebbles, 4.0 x 200.0 x 200.0 cm, Tate Gallery, London. This is a concentric arrangement on a floor of rocks Long collected while walking.

 

 

Richard Long, South Bank Circle, 1991, delabole slate, 10.0 x 199.7 x 199.7 cm, Tate Gallery, London.

 

Michele Oka Doner (American, contemporary), Ice Ring, 1989, cast bronze, 3 / 3, 18 x 120 x 120 inches, Grounds For Sculpture, NJ.

“At the early age of 7, Michele Oka Doner came upon a Venetian grotto chair in Florida.  This observation taught her "that furniture doesn't have to be mundane."  Later on in her career, Doner created furniture, works of art which are tied closely to mythology and celestial surroundings.  Ice Ring represents the ice rings found around Saturn as captured in photographs by the space craft Voyager.  In the center is Radiant Disk, incised with radial marks that attract and channel light.  The difference in surface treatments of the two works contrast references to the coldness of Saturn’s ice rings with the bright, warmth of the sun. These pieces are also made to serve as a table and bench.  Doner believed that making the bench round, as opposed to straight, would lend to it a more social atmosphere.”  Quoted from Joy Hakanson Colby, "Sculptor Transforms The

Mundane Into The Mythological," The Detroit News, April 11, 1990.

Damien Hirst (British, 1965-), Valium, 2000.

oval - An egg-like two-dimensional shape that looks like a circle that has been stretched to make it longer. The two ends of an oval may or may not be the same size and shape. Oval can be either a noun or an adjective. A three-dimensional form with oval shape is an ovoid.

Dexamenos (Greek, Chios), Intaglio of a Flying Heron, 5th century BCE, chalcedony, gold, 1.7 x 2.2 cm, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. See Greek art.

Dame Barbara Hepworth (English, 1903-1975), Oval Sculpture (No. 2), 1943, cast 1958, plaster, 29.3 x 40.0 x 25.5 cm, Tate Gallery, London. Because oval refers to a two-dimensional shape, this three-dimensional form would better be described as ovoid or ovate — shaped like an egg.

polygon - A closed plane figure (shape) bounded by three or more straight-line segments. A list of names of polygons, and the formulae for finding their areas when their sides are equilateral :

triangle square pentagon hexagon heptagon octagon nonagon decagon undecagon dodecagon

Other 4-sided polygons are the parallelogram (can be equilateral or non-equilateral), quadrilateral (sides can be of any lengths), rectangle (non-equilateral), and rhombus (non-equilateral), trapezium, and trapezoid (non-equilateral).

triangle - A closed two-dimensional polygon bounded by three straight-line segments. The sum of its interior angles is always 180°. The formula with which to find an equilateral triangle's area is 0.433 times the length of one side squared. The formula for finding any triangle's area: half of the longest side multiplied by its height.

An example of a triangle in art:

Ellsworth Kelly (American, 1923-), Yellow Red Curve, 1972, oil on canvas, 115 x 302 cm, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris. See Minimalism.

square - A closed two-dimensional shape (polygon) bounded by four straight-line segments of equal length (equilateral) joined at four equal (right) angles. The formula with which to find its area: the length of one side squared (see below). The distance between opposite corners is the square root (see below) of the sum of the square of two sides. A quantity is squared when it is multiplied once by the same quantity (for example, 4 squared=4x4=16). The square root is the divisor of a quantity that when squared gives the quantity (for example, the square root of 4 is 2, because 4/2=2, and 2x2=4).

Examples:

In these images, negative spaces have been shaped and placed among positive spaces so that a viewer can make closure on a square and a cube.

Examples of works in which squares are important elements:

Kasimir Malevich (Russian, 1878-1935), Black Square, [1913] 1923-29, oil on canvas, 41 3/4 x 41 7/8 inches (106.2 x 106.5 cm), State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. See Russian art.

Joseph Albers (German-American, 1888-1976), Homage to the Square: Soft Resonance, 1962, oil on composition board, 48 x 48 inches (121.92 cm x 121.92 cm), Memorial Art Gallery, U of Rochester, NY.

Joseph Albers, Day and Night VIII (from Homage to the Square), 1963, lithograph, 18 7/8 x 20 7/16 inches (47.94 x 51.91 cm), Memorial Art Gallery, U of Rochester, NY.

Joseph Albers, Homage to the Square: On Dry Ground, 1963, oil on Masonite, 40 1/4 x 30 3/4 inches (102.2 x 78.1 cm), California State University Library.

Frank Stella (American, 1936-), Hyena Stomp, 1962, oil on canvas, 195.6 x 195.6 cm, Tate Gallery, London. See Minimalism.

amorphous - An anomalous, shapeless form, without crystalline structure. Amorphous materials have no sharply defined melting point, and surfaces of pieces that break have undulating surfaces like those of lumps of broken glass or of resin, both of which are examples of amorphous materials.

Example:

Louise Bourgeois (French-American, 1911-), Quarantania, 1941, seven pine elements on a wood base, 84 3/4 x 31 1/4 x 29 1/4 inches (215.3 x 79.4 x 74.3 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. See feminism and feminist art and sculpture.

biomorphic form - An abstract form whose shapes are more organic than geometric, more curvaceous than linear. Much of the work of Hans [Jean] Arp (German-French, 1887-1966) was composed as biomorphic forms.

organic - An irregular shape, or one that might be found in nature, rather than a regular, mechanical shape.

Other examples:

 Frederick Kiesler (Austrian, 1896-1966), Nesting Coffee Table, 1935-38, cast aluminum, each 9 1/2 x 34 x 25 inches (24.1 x 86.4 x 63.5 cm) and 9 1/2 x 22 x 16 1/4 inches (24 x 55.9 x 41.3 cm), Museum of Modern Art, NY.

 

Jean [or Hans] Arp (French, born Germany (Alsace), 1886-1966), Human Concretion, 1935, plaster, 19 1/2 x 18 3/4 x 25 1/2 inches (49.5 x 47.6 x 64.7 cm), Museum of Modern Art, NY. See Dada.

 

Leaves and Navels I, Jean (Hans) Arp (French, born Germany (Alsace). 1886-1966) 1930. Painted wood, 39 3/4 x 31 3/4" (100.9 x 80.6 cm). MOMA - Purchase.

 

 

 

 Isamu Noguchi (American, 1904-1988), Kouros, 1944-45, marble, height 9 feet 9 inches (297.2 cm); base: 34 1/8 x 42 inches (86.7 x 106.7 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY. This figurative and biomorphic modern sculpture has abstracted the human figure into fragmented, bonelike elements.

 

concretion - In the work of Surrealist Jean (or Hans) Arp (French, 1887-1966), sculptural form characterized by twisting and growing effects.

FORM

In its widest sense, total structure; a synthesis of all the visible aspects of that structure and of the manner in which they are united to create its distinctive character. The form of a work is what enables us to perceive it.

Form also refers to an element of art that is three-dimensional (height, width, and depth) and encloses volume. For example, a triangle, which is two-dimensional, is a shape, but a pyramid, which is three-dimensional, is a form. Cubes, spheres, ovoids, pyramids, cone, and cylinders are examples of various forms.

Also, all of the elements of a work of art independent of their meaning. Formal elements are primary features which are not a matter of semantic significance — including color, dimensions, line, mass, medium, scale, shape, space, texture, value; and the principles of design under which they are placed — including balance, contrast, dominance, harmony, movement, proportion, proximity, rhythm, similarity, unity, and variety.

TEXTURE - An element of art, texture is the surface quality or "feel" of an object, its smoothness, roughness, softness, etc. Textures may be actual or simulated. Actual textures can be felt with the fingers, while simulated textures are suggested by an artist in the painting of different areas of a picture — often in representing drapery, metals, rocks, hair, etc. Words describing textures include: flat, smooth (third row, right), shiny, glossy, glittery, velvety, feathery, soft, wet, gooey, furry, sandy, leathery (second row, right), crackled (upper left), prickly, abrasive, rough (first row, right), furry, bumpy, corrugated (second row, left), puffy (second row, third), rusty (third row, second), and slimey (third row, third).

Examples of textures:

Examples of artworks in which textures are particularly important:

 Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471-1528), The Rhinoceros, drawing and woodcut, 1515, British Museum, London.

"Dürer produced this drawing and woodcut from reports of the arrival in Lisbon of an Indian rhinoceros in May of 1515. No rhinoceros had been seen in Europe for over 1000 years, so Dürer had to work solely from these reports. He covered the creature's legs with scales and the body with hard, patterned plates. Perhaps these features interpret lost sketches, or even the text, which states, '[The rhinoceros] has the color of a speckled tortoise and it is covered with thick scales'. So convincing was Dürer's fanciful creation that for the next 300 years European illustrators borrowed from his woodcut, even after they had seen living rhinoceroses without plates and scales." See nature and Northern Renaissance.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Giving Thanks, 2000.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Reverence, 2005.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Which Comes First, 2004.

Biography

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was born at the Indian Mission on the Flathead Reservation in 1940. She is an enrolled Flathead Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Nation, Montana.

She received an Associate of Arts Degree at Olympic College in Bremerton Washington in 1960. She attended the University of Washington, received her BA in Art Education at Framingham State College in 1976 and a masters degree in art at the University of New Mexico in 1980.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is one of the most acclaimed American Indian artists today. She has been reviewed in all major art periodicals. Smith has had over 90 solo exhibits in the past 30 years and has done printmaking projects nationwide. Over that same time, she has organized and/or curated over 30 Native exhibitions, lectured at more than 185 universities, museums and conferences internationally, most recently at 5 universities in

China. Smith has completed several collaborative public art works such as the floor design in the Great Hall of the new Denver Airport; an in-situ sculpture piece in Yerba Buena Park, San Francisco and a mile-long sidewalk history trail in West Seattle. She is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Quito, Ecuador; the Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; The Walker, Minneapolis, MN; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan and The Whitney Museum, NY. Smith calls herself a cultural art worker. With her Native worldview, Smith's work

addresses today's tribal politics, human rights and environmental issues with humor. Critic Gerrit Henry, (Art in America 2001) wrote: "For all the primal nature of her origins, Smith adeptly takes on contemporary American society in her paintings, drawings and prints, looking at things Native and national through bifocals of the old and the new, the sacred and the profane, the divine and the witty."

Feminist Artist Statement

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith – Statement of a Cultural Arts Worker Artist

I have memory of making things with my hands from mud, leaves, sticks and rocks from very early in my life. I knew that I entered another world, one that took me out of the violence and fear that dominated my life. First grade opened a new world with foreign substances such as tempera, crayons and library paste. Once they became familiar their smell could almost make me swoon.

When I turned 13, I rode to town in the back of a pickup with other farm workers to see a movie about Henri Toulouse-Lautrec. I so desperately wanted to be an artist, that later I took axle grease from my father’s truck to make a goatee on my face and made a cardboard palette. I asked a man down the road if he could take my picture. This was my way of entering the skin of an artist, since I had never seen a woman artist. Toulouse was a little person, so I knelt on my knees for the picture, thinking that would make me an authentic artist.

After my first year at a community college, the professor told me even though I could draw better than the men students, that a woman could not be an artist. For the next 20 years I struggled to get a degree in art ed. I attended college in many places while I raised my two sons alone. My story is similar to other Indian women my age.

In the mid l970’s in Santa Fe, I found that only Native men were able to exhibit in the galleries. I set about organizing Indian women to move out of the trading posts and into galleries and museums My training as a mother, helped me with this activism. I organized the Grey Canyon Artists, located and shipped exhibitions, first in New Mexico and then across the U.S. While working as a full time artist, I have also consistently organized and curated exhibitions for Native artists for over 30 years. One of my most memorable was the first touring Native women’s exhibit “Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar and Sage”. After receiving the catalog, one woman wrote me that she laid the catalog against her cheek and cried, she had no idea there were so many Native women artists out there and she no longer felt alone.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/feminist_art_base/archive/images/159.1556.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/feminist_art_base/gallery/

Various work of Andy Goldsworthy:

SPACEAn element of art that refers to the distance or area between, around, above, below, or within things. It can be described as two-dimensional or three-dimensional; as flat, shallow, or deep; as open or closed; as positive or negative; and as actual, ambiguous, or illusory.

two-dimensional - Having height and width, but no depth; flat.

three-dimensional - Having, or appearing to have, height, width, and depth.

Also see chiaroscuro, compass rose, direction, form, illusion, mass, perspective, sculpture, shadow box, space, statue, two-dimensional, and wireframe.

Chiaroscuro - A word borrowed from Italian ("light and shade" or "dark") referring to the modeling of volume by depicting light and shade by contrasting them boldly.

This is one means of strengthening an illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface, and was an important topic among artists of the Renaissance.

perspective - The technique artists use to project an illusion of the three-dimensional world onto a two-dimensional surface. Perspective helps to create a sense of depth — of receding space. Fundamental techniques used to achieve perspective are: controlling variation between sizes of depicted subjects, overlapping some of them, and placing those that are on the depicted ground as lower when nearer and higher when deeper. In addition, there are three major types of perspective: aerial perspective, herringbone perspective, and linear perspective.

Example:

Giotto di Bondone (Italian, Florentine, 1266/76-1337). This is one of two views Giotto painted side-by-side using herringbone perspective. These scenes are interiors of what appear to be sacristries or a choir, in perfect perspective. The effect is so realistic that we feel we are looking into actual rooms. Our gaze moves beyond the ogival arch to the cross-vault of each room, and thence to the Gothic mullioned window. That the two symmetrical chapels appear to have approximately the same vanishing point is an astonishing anticipation of the fifteenth-century perspective system. Though their significance was once ignored, these small scenes are now recognized as an extremely important phase in the development of Giotto's conception of pictorial space. See trecento.

 

AERIAL PERSPECTIVE - The perception of depth in nature can be enhanced by the appearance of atmospheric haze. Although this haze is most commonly humidity (or cloudiness), it could be rain or snow, smoke, or any other kind of vapor. Aerial perspective is the portrayal of that atmospheric haze -- one means to adding to an illusion of depth in depicting space on a flat surface. It is achieved by using less focus, along with bluer, lighter, and duller hues for the distant spaces and objects depicted in a picture. Be careful not to confuse aerial perspective with aerial view.

One of the first artists to use this technique was Masaccio (Italian, 1401?-1428). Aerial perspective is also referred to as atmospheric perspective.

Examples of pictures in which artists have used aerial perspective:

 

Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (La Joconde) (1479 - d. before 1550), c. 1503-1506, oil on wood panel, 77 x 53 cm, Louvre. Many artists have created their own versions of this image. See landscape, Renaissance, sfumato, and xenophobia.

 T. Worthington Whittredge (American, 1820-1910), Fight Below the Battlements, 1849, oil on canvas, Kresge Art Museum. Wittredge was a member of the Hudson River School of painters. Toward the horizon on the left side of this painting, we can see Whittredge's use of aerial perspective.

Look more closely at this (detail of the) deepest part of Whittredge's picture.

 Compare its depth of color to that seen in the foreground.

 

Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1891), Bathing at Asnières (Une Baignade, Asnières), 1883-1884 (retouched 1887), 79 x 118 1/2 inches, National Gallery, London. Also see Neo-Impressionism

herringbone perspective - A type of perspective in which the lines of projection converge not on a vanishing point, but on a vertical axis at the center of the picture, as in Roman painting.

linear perspective - A system of drawing or painting in which the artist attempts to create the illusion of spatial depth on a two-dimensional surface. It works by following consistent geometric rules for rendering objects as they appear to the human eye. For.instance, we see parallel lines as converging in the distance, although in reality they do not. Stated another way, the lines of buildings and other objects in a picture are slanted inward making them appear to extend back into space. If lengthened these lines will meet at a point along an imaginary horizontal line representing the eye level. Each such imaginary line is called an orthogonal. The point at which such lines meet is called a vanishing point.

The invention of linear perspective dates to the early 1400s, with Filippo Brunelleschi's experiments in perspective painting and Leon Battista Alberti's treatise on perspective theory.

Irregular applications of linear perspective have resulted in various optical illusions and anamorphosis.