Expressionism

After the Dada movement, Surrealism was born in the early 20th century. Dada was an artistic movement that brought about just as much thought as reactions to World War I did. The Dada movement was mostly based on irrational thoughts over rational ones, free art as well as human expectations. Unlike this concept, Surrealism did not have a war idea behind it, rather it had more of an imaginative notion. With guidance of subconscious dreams, Surrealism emerged, letting the imagination go untethered…

Reading Between the Art Art, in any shape or form, can be interpreted into text nowadays. Whether it’s a photograph, painting or a sculpture, people can form an elucidation from the work. Some artists use symbolism to make the audience think about the piece and try to find the meaning behind the work. Other artists, however, draw a direct representation of what they want their art to convey to the audience; in other words realism. Edward Hopper, artist of the painting “Automat (1927)”, is an…

Agua Grande is an interesting art work created by Cai Guoqiang. It can be seen both as a performance art or a painting. The process of making the Agua Grande is beautiful and can be seen as performance art because it combined both artist’s movement and strong visual impact. Cai use gunpowder as the material to paint his art, he will set the gunpowder on the paper and covered the entire paper and gunpowder, he will reserve a fuse so he can then set the fire on and burn the gunpowder under the…

The Las Meninas portrait is complex and involves Baroque characteristics. Not only is it very painterly in the way that it just lets highlights and the brushwork sit on the surface, not blended in, but at the same time it involves a tonalistic approach to the shading with shades of white turning into gray and eventually to black. Las Meninas is also complex with the subjects and objects within the work. The portrait or mirror in the Las Meninas work is the same scale as the Las Meninas work and…

The line, ‘colour is in itself enigmatic in the sensations which it gives us’, resonates with Faa Iheihe due to the mysteriousness of the overall composition. The image is a depiction of what appears to be a paradise-like setting. Primitive-looking men and women are placed across the long painting accompanied by a horse and a dog. Reds, yellows, greens, and browns are recognizable throughout the entire painting. These colors often are related to warm colors. This is suitable due to the…

Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried both are working out of the modernist perspective in the 1950’s and 1960’s. This perspective is a framework that describes how art could be understood during this time period. Modernist art in both Greenberg and Fried’s perspectives appeals to the concept of medium specificity, how this ends up affecting the pictorial space and in the end the meaning of the work as understood by the artist/viewer. In this writing a discussion on the relevant aspects of this…

Art is a form of communication that allows the artist to express their emotions to the viewer. Works evoke emotions in people, which results in varying perceptions because each viewer interprets art differently depending on cultural background, personal history, and many other factors. The artist Paul Cézanne and Maureen Gallace are both similar in the way they reflect their content in art by recreating everyday objects and transferring what they see onto the canvas by interpreting their…

Stepping Out is an art created by Roy Lichtenstein in 1978, 1900 A.D. It was a painting made out of oil and magna on a canvas with a dimension of 86 ¾ x 70 1/8 inches. The painting is portraying two people; a man and a woman with different styles when it comes to their outside appearances, but with the combination of shape and color they had both compliment each other and fill what they are lack of. The types of elements that dominating in this piece are the lines and colors. The…

Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Much paintings stand the test of time. Foraging new ideologies for our society and culture. Flowing and spiraling through the abysses of Van Gogh's and Munch's minds throws their emotional thoughts into the forms of paintings. Van Gogh is a Post-Impressionist artist meaning “he was drawn to bright colors and visible, distinctive brushstrokes” (Adams 789), with this in mind, the oil painting Starry Night was born. Stemming from this period was the emotional development…

When studying art through the ages, a person will begin to notice certain similarities and difference that come to light during different ages. Frequently, it can be seen that one work of art could not have come into being without their predecessor works. The two works of art that I will be discussing are The Fighting Temeraire by J.M.W. Turner [Fig 1] and The Manneporte near Étretat by Claude Monet [Fig 2]. To begin, The Fighting Temeraire is an oil on canvas painting, measuring 90.7 x 121.6 cm…