Our perspective, or the way we view different aspects of our world both on a physical and subconscious level, helps us to comprehend the size, color, shape, and texture of everything around us. The representation of people’s expressions through art defines our culture because we can analyze how people feel and how people respond to certain facets of life. A general belief about all art is that it is comprised of three individual parts: the person viewing the art, the actual piece, and the artist himself. It is important to consider every single part when looking at art because each viewer can perceive an artist’s portrayal of an image differently. In Looking at Art, Alice Chase portrays the difference in the way artists have interpreted and expressed how they feel about different sceneries over time.
Throughout her work, Chase focuses on how artist from different points in history interpret what they see in order to convey their feelings through art. She begins with the Ancient Egyptians claiming that to an ancient Egyptian artist, the most salient aspects of his piece would be the shape of the garden pool and “its creatures swimming in it.” Ancient artist would see this photo as a kind of map. The pools would be rectangular because they were actually shaped like rectangles in reality. Zigzag lines represented ripples. Birds and fish would be depicted as profiles. These two-dimensional maps that ancient Egyptians created were literal representations of what Egyptian artists saw in their time period. In contrast to the Egyptians, the ancient Romans would depict cities that they conquered and gorgeous outdoor imagery. Chase writes, “The Empress Livia, wife of Augustus, had a “garden room” in which she could enjoy the illusion of being surrounded by a shady wood…The landscapes were never real but rather the fanciful imaginings of city dwellers who think of the county as a bright and happy world remote from turmoil.” She then goes on to compare these European and African artistic views to that of the Chinese. The Chinese created paintings that captured nature in its entirety. Nature played an essential role in Chinese religion so depicting nature with beauty and with such a massive persona was appropriate for illustrating the power of God. The Chinese used techniques such as varying brush strokes, shading, and multicolored objects. As art progressed into the 1800s, we began to see a more realistic interpretation of scenery. Painter began making pictures of their homes. They began traveling to undiscovered areas and illustrating what they saw. They paid more attention to light, color scheme, and shade in order to capture a sense of realism in all their paintings. The next era of art moved away from this replication of nature. Artists like Vincent van Gogh began making abstract images. The evolution of art and the way artists expressed what they saw helps us to analyze the change in culture over the course of history.
In the next chapter, Chases illustrates the evolution of art and understanding on the artists level and the viewer’s level. With regard to the Egyptians, we see only two-dimensional art with no regard to shadow. This helps the viewer to understand that this civilization was not advanced enough to develop the mental capacity to make shadows in their artwork. With Roman art, we began to see realism and accurate depictions of shadow and color shades. This evidence indicates that this civilization tried to produce what they had felt was a close replication of what they saw. Chase goes on to critique this artistry because she states that the viewer would realize that these realistic paintings lacked true perspective. They failed to represent the true meaning of art, which is how the artist feels about the piece rather than how it looks in reality.
The evolution of art throughout history should be looked at, at 3 different perspectives: the artist’, the viewers’, and the piece of art itself. From the two dimensional representations created by the ancient Egyptians to the abstract art created by artists such as Van Gogh, each piece is indicative of how the artist was feeling. Through the analysis of the evolution of art and perspective, we can develop an understanding of the cultures that existed before us today.