Arts in NYC – Steven Graff
Luis Feliciano
9/17/14
Looking at Art
Art is the expression of human ideas and imagination. The visual arts come in many different forms, such as sculptures or paintings. Looking for Art by Alice Elizabeth Chase tackles different situations that artists have faced since the origins of art. Over time they have crafted special techniques and forms to vividly recreate landscapes and people.
Chapter 3 is all about scenery – how artists illustrate backgrounds, foregrounds, and how they differ from one another. When one artist sees a view, they remember and paint it differently than other artists would do so. Different artists emphasize different parts of their world such as prioritizing which objects get brighter colors and their positions within the frame. This shows how everybody sees things differently. Ten people can look at the same scene, but remember it and depict in ten, very different ways.
For example, Egyptians first started off by painting literally what they saw. They focused on accurately drawing shapes of objects, almost seemingly drawing things in the form of maps. This method lacks the beauty found in nature. Things are essentially drawn as geometrical figures, but in nature things aren’t really found like that. Objects come in different shapes and sizes, with a wide assortment of colors. By the middle of the nineteenth century, artists began to use their eyes as photographers used cameras – merely to see. Artists realized that what they drew didn’t just have to be a representation of what they saw, but more of an expression of their own thoughts and feelings.
On the other hand, chapter 4 is all about portraying the human body and perspective. At first, artists did not take into account perspective. For this reason, many of their paintings represented humans in two dimensions. The Egyptians for example, wanted to create a method of drawing human bodies, which represented the face with a profile view, the shoulders with a front view, and the legs with a side view. Paintings in Italy from the second or first century B.C. were the first works of art to incorporate shadow. This gave the people in the paintings depth and added a sense of realism to the entire work.
With respect to perspective, artists had trouble painting what they saw, while also maintaining accuracy in their work. As a building vanishes into the distance, it appears smaller although in reality it is not smaller. Creativity was often sacrificed for accuracy. Soon people started to look for scientific reasoning. Here came the different forms of perspective. The two main forms of perspective are one-point and two-point perspective. One-point perspective involves putting a point, generally in the middle of the painting, and having everything in the painting fade away towards that one point. Two-point perspective is the same as one point perspective, but just using two different points. This added more realism, but even then people realized that this “vanishing” perspective method could sometimes appear unrealistic. The human eye does not look towards one, or even two points. It is constantly moving around looking at various things from all sorts of angles. Take a step forward, or backward, and things look even more different. This is what makes art so unique. There are no right or wrong ways to depict a scene; there are no right or wrong answers.
