- The Artist Looks at the View
All artists have different perspectives. When basing their art on their surroundings, some artists may choose to zoom in, select, and emphasize a certain point, some may aim to show a more holistic view, and some may create completely abstract pieces. It is all decided but the artist and how he or she perceives the world around him or her. It is shown throughout history, that different groups of people and different cultures tend to be drawn to different styles and techniques when it comes to artwork.
To an ancient Egyptian artist , when drawing a garden pool, the most important aspect to emphasize was the shape of the pool as well as the animals residing in the pool and the surrounding trees. Therefore, the result looks similar to a map, in which the pool is rectangular with defined zigzag lines meant to represent ripples, and animals shown in profile.
Similar to an Egyptian artist, an Assyrian artist in the seventh century also chose to show animals and people in profile. However, in this artist’s work, trees and shrubs are silhouetted, while the highlight of the work seems to be a monument with a relief showing a king killing a lion on the top of a hill.
Compared to the Assyrian artist, a Roman artist perceived trees and shrubs differently. Whereas the Assyrian artist chose to silhouette the trees and shrubs, the Roman artist chose to display trees and shrubs clearly as a large part of painting in order to create an idealistic setting in which heroes return home. The landscapes are the imaginings of city dwellers who think of the country as a bright utopia of sorts, free from disasters.
The Chinese took trees, vegetation, and nature in general, even more seriously; often, landscape was the main subject of the paintings. Color and people were not widely emphasized because nature was believed to express the infinity of God and the different states and emotions of man. Paintings were meant to be “read” and majority of the time, they were accompanied by poems on the side. Different objects were also given different brush strokes; mountain tops were sharply outlined and rose steeply.
During the fifteenth century in the West, views of fields, the sky, and hills were common. However, the use of landscape differed vastly between the North and the South. In the South, landscape was little more than just a setting. In the North, the landscape was valued and meant to add to the action and story shown in the painting. The thoughts of the artist in the North were laced with religion and God. In every aspect and detail of nature, the perfection of God is observed.
Within the next few centuries, landscape paintings flourished. In England, the tones, colors, atmospheres, and uses of light of paintings were closely observed and reproduced. In the US during the eighteenth century, landscapes took a downfall before becoming popular again in the nineteenth century. This was due to the fact that during the eighteenth century, the lands in America were vast and intimidating. By the nineteenth century, cities were established and patriotism grew. Landscapes during this time served to emphasize the vastness and fertility of different regions in America. Similar to the Roman artist’s romanticized ideal landscapes, the American landscapes of the nineteenth century also idealized the great West and were meant to cater to the imaginings of city dwellers.
Further into the nineteenth century, works of art became very open to interpretation and were based on the feelings and expressions of the artist. Even in modern times, Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” is still one of the most well known paintings in the world.
- The Artist Looks at People and Space
In terms of people and their relation in space, artists of different eras and cultures have approached problems in different ways. For example,the Egyptian artist made humans into flat profile images. In Mesopotamia, a similar method was applied, in order to clearly show overlap in a way that would not be confusing to spectators. Contrastingly, some Italian and Greek paintings actually show depth rather than the 2D perspective that the Assyrians and Egyptians chose.
In the fifteenth century, Italian architects finally began discovered the laws behind vision and perspective as well as how objects appear in space. By the end of the seventeenth century, vanishing point, in which all parallel lines of a painting lead to one point, was finally understood. The Chinese and Japanese on the other hand, preferred to use isometric perspective, where parallel lines stay parallel.
