All artwork on a canvas utilizes at least one of the three main elements of color, light and form in a variety of ways. Color gives inanimate objects life. Color is the true quintessence of a painting as rhythm is to music. Considering its subjective nature, color can be used to convey a wide range of emotions and perspectives. Different hues convey their own aspect of liveliness. Green is natural as yellow is to happiness and sunshine. When you take into account the intensity, the strength and vividness, of a color you can convey different moods. For example, the dark colors of a night scene can convey mystery as soft light colors are to femininity.
Painters use light as a bandage for relating figures in an image. For example, if a painting consists of a group of figures around a campsite fire, since all of the characters are experiencing the same thing, they should each be lit from the side in which they face the campfire. The experience binds them together, so the way in which light is used, is to realistically depict such a reality.
Form is simply the element in art, which refers to shape. Are there three dimensional shapes and figures or are there two-dimensional shapes and figures. It is form that allows the viewers of works of art to analyze and understand the given.
In the painting Beach Girl, the artist Morris Hirshfield utilizes a very simplistic form of color and lighting. The background consists of only three shades of blue. As the image opens up, the shades begin to darken. This element of contrast between a single color, allows the beach girl to pop off of the painting and really draw the viewer’s attention. The use of blue mellows out the image giving it a very calm, soothing feeling as if one were looking at water, which is also blue.
Likewise, Hirschfield use of lighting immediately draws one’s attention to the girl because she is of a brighter shade and a more defined color of blue, tan and white. He paints an image that is concrete and the viewer is immediately able to identify that the beach girl is the main attraction in the painting. Everything around her is just supplemental detail in order to give the painting more depth. The anatomy of the girl is drawn to the scale of a realistic girl in everyday life.
An antithesis to the painting by Morris Hirshfield is a painting called Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun And Moon by Robert Delaunay. In the painting, Robert Delaunay paints an abstract image. Thus, the viewer can interpret the image in a number of different ways. There isn’t one right answer to what is present in an abstract image.
In order to portray such an abstract image and contrary to Hirsfield, Delaunay manipulates the depth and movement of the painting through various interactions of color. Yet, without directly referencing a concrete image, the viewer of his artwork can imagine his inclination to the natural world. The circular framework can be symbolic of the universe with the brighter colors representing life during the day while the dark blue side being symbolic of nightlife when the moon is up. Delaunay seems to have broken up the form by light in order to create color planes, thus creating the nature of the painting. The use of two-dimensional shapes simply allows figures to be pieced together into what the viewer can interpret as something concrete. Some shapes are actual orientation of the human anatomy as an oval can be seen as symbolically used to represent the child’s head in the upper right hand corner of the image. Then, in the lower left hand corner a conglomerate of shapes are used to piece together a potential figure’s face.
For example, when I initially saw the painting, I immediately visualized a family in the bottom right hand corner who were bunched together early in the morning due to the prominent use of yellow, the color of the sun. When I looked up at the top left hand corner, I immediately visualized a mother tucking her child into bed because the prominence of blue was reminiscent of the night sky as the moon is set to appear.
In each respective painting, the artists manipulated the color, light and forms to ultimately portray different images although they used the same basic artistic elements. This allowed for a uniform interpretation in Hirshfield’s painting compared to a more infinite interpretation in Delaunay’s painting. Hirschfield creating a concrete image while Delaunay created an abstract image.
