O---LEVEL VISUAL ARTS.
INTRODUCTION.
For the Wikipedia Manual of Style concerning visual arts, see WP:VAMOS
The current usage of the term "visual arts" includes fine art as well as the applied, decorative arts and crafts, but this was not always the case. Before the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, the term 'artist' was often restricted to a person working in the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) and not the handicraft, craft, or applied art media. The distinction was emphasized by artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement who valued vernacular art forms as much as high forms.[4] Art schools made a distinction between the fine arts and the crafts maintaining that a craftsperson could not be considered a practitioner of the arts. The increasing tendency to privilege painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture, above other arts has been a feature of Western art as well as East Asian art. In both regions painting has been seen as relying to the highest degree on the imagination of the artist, and the furthest removed from manual labour - in Chinese painting the most highly valued styles were those of "scholar-painting", at least in theory practiced by gentleman amateurs. The Western hierarchy of genres reflected similar attitudes.
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Education and training
Training in the visual arts has generally been through variations of the apprentice and workshop system. In Europe the Renaissance movement to increase the prestige of the artist led to the academy system for training artists, and today most train in art schools at tertiary levels. Visual arts have now become an elective subject in most education systems. (See also art education.)Drawing
Main article: Drawing
Drawing is a means of making an image,
using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally
involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or
moving a tool across a surface using dry media such as graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers. Digital tools that simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing, hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as a draftsman or draughtsman.Drawing goes back at least 16,000 years to Paleolithic cave representations of animals such as those at Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain. In ancient Egypt, ink drawings on papyrus, often depicting people, were used as models for painting or sculpture. Drawings on Greek vases, initially geometric, later developed to the human form with black-figure pottery during the 7th century BC.[5]
With paper becoming common in Europe by the 15th century, drawing was adopted by masters such as Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci who sometimes treated drawing as an art in its own right rather than a preparatory stage for painting or sculpture.[6]
Painting
Main article: Painting
Origins and early history
Main article: History of painting
Like drawing, painting has its documented origins in caves and on
rock faces. The finest examples, believed by some to be 32,000 years
old, are in the Chauvet and Lascaux
caves in southern France. In shades of red, brown, yellow and black,
the paintings on the walls and ceilings are of bison, cattle, horses and
deer.
The Renaissance
Main article: Italian Renaissance painting
Apart from the illuminated manuscripts produced by monks during the Middle Ages, the next significant contribution to European art was from Italy's renaissance painters. From Giotto in the 13th century to Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael at the beginning of the 16th century, this was the richest period in Italian art as the chiaroscuro technique was used to create the illusion of 3-D space.[8]
Dutch masters
Main article: Dutch Golden Age painting
The 17th century saw the emergence of the great Dutch masters such as the versatile Rembrandt who is especially remembered for his portraits and Bible scenes, and Vermeer who specialized in interior scenes of Dutch life.Impressionism
Main article: Impressionism
Impressionism began in France in the 19th century with a loose association of artists including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne
who brought a new freely brushed style to painting, often choosing to
paint realistic scenes of modern life outside rather than in the studio.
They achieved intense colour vibration by using pure, unmixed colours
and short brush strokes.[9]
Post-impressionism
Main article: Post-Impressionism
Towards the end of the 19th century, several young painters took
impressionism a stage further, using geometric forms and unnatural
colour to depict emotions while striving for deeper symbolism. Of
particular note are Paul Gauguin, who was strongly influenced by Asian, African and Japanese art, Vincent van Gogh, a Dutchman who moved to France where he drew on the strong sunlight of the south, and Toulouse-Lautrec, remembered for his vivid paintings of night life in the Paris district of Montmartre.[10]Symbolism, expressionism and cubism
Main article: Modern art
Edvard Munch, a Norwegian artist, developed his symbolistic approach at the end of the 19th century, inspired by the French impressionist Manet. The Scream
(1893), his most famous work, is widely interpreted as representing the
universal anxiety of modern man. Partly as a result of Munch's
influence, the German expressionist movement originated in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century as artists such as Ernst Kirschner and Erich Heckel began to distort reality for an emotional effect. In parallel, the style known as cubism developed in France as artists focused on the volume and space of sharp structures within a composition. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
were the leading proponents of the movement. Objects are broken up,
analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form. By the 1920s, the
style had developed into surrealism with Dali and Magritte.[11]Printmaking
Main article: Printmaking
Printmaking
is creating, for artistic purposes, an image on a matrix that is then
transferred to a two-dimensional (flat) surface by means of ink (or
another form of pigmentation). Except in the case of a monotype, the same matrix can be used to produce many examples of the print.
European history
Main article: Old master print
Prints in the Western tradition produced before about 1830 are known as old master prints. In Europe, from around 1400 AD woodcut, was used for master prints on paper by using printing techniques developed in the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Michael Wolgemut improved German woodcut from about 1475, and Erhard Reuwich, a Dutchman, was the first to use cross-hatching. At the end of the century Albrecht Dürer brought the Western woodcut to a level that has never been surpassed, increasing the status of the single-leaf woodcut.[12]Chinese origin and practice
Main article: Woodblock printing
In China,
the art of printmaking developed some 1,100 years ago as illustrations
alongside text cut in woodblocks for printing on paper. Initially images
were mainly religious but in the Song Dynasty, artists began to cut landscapes. During the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1616–1911) dynasties, the technique was perfected for both religious and artistic engravings.[13][14]Development In Japan 1603-1867
Main article: Woodblock printing in Japan
Woodblock printing in Japan (Japanese: 木版画, moku hanga) is a
technique best known for its use in the ukiyo-e artistic genre; however,
it was also used very widely for printing books in the same period.
Woodblock printing had been used in China for centuries to print books,
long before the advent of movable type, but was only widely adopted in
Japan surprisingly late, during the Edo period (1603-1867). Although
similar to woodcut in western printmaking in some regards, moku hanga
differs greatly in that water-based inks are used (as opposed to western
woodcut, which uses oil-based inks), allowing for a wide range of vivid
color, glazes and color transparency.Photography
Main article: Photography
Photography is the process of making pictures by means of the action of light. Light patterns reflected or emitted from objects are recorded onto a sensitive medium or storage chip through a timed exposure. The process is done through mechanical shutters or electronically timed exposure of photons into a chemical processing or digitizing devices known as cameras.The word comes from the Greek words φως phos ("light"), and γραφις graphis ("stylus", "paintbrush") or γραφη graphê, together meaning "drawing with light" or "representation by means of lines" or "drawing." Traditionally, the product of photography has been called a photograph. The term photo is an abbreviation; many people also call them pictures. In digital photography, the term image has begun to replace photograph. (The term image is traditional in geometric optics.)
Filmmaking
Main article: Filmmaking
Filmmaking is the process of making a motion-picture, from an initial
conception and research, through scriptwriting, shooting and recording,
animation or other special effects, editing, sound and music work and
finally distribution to an audience; it refers broadly to the creation
of all types of films, embracing documentary, strains of theatre and
literature in film, and poetic or experimental practices, and is often
used to refer to video-based processes as well.Computer art
Main article: Computer art
Computer art is any in which computers played a role in production or display. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD, video game, website, algorithm, performance or gallery installation. Many traditional disciplines are now integrating digital technologies and, as a result, the lines between traditional works of art and new media works created using computers have been blurred. For instance, an artist may combine traditional painting with algorithmic art and other digital techniques. As a result, defining computer art by its end product can be difficult. Nevertheless, this type of art is beginning to appear in art museum exhibits, though it has yet to prove its legitimacy as a form unto itself and this technology is widely seen in contemporary art more as a tool rather than a form as with painting.
Computer usage has blurred the distinctions between illustrators, photographers, photo editors, 3-D modelers, and handicraft artists. Sophisticated rendering and editing software has led to multi-skilled image developers. Photographers may become digital artists. Illustrators may become animators. Handicraft may be computer-aided or use computer-generated imagery as a template. Computer clip art usage has also made the clear distinction between visual arts and page layout less obvious due to the easy access and editing of clip art in the process of paginating a document, especially to the unskilled observer.
Plastic arts
Main article: Plastic arts
Plastic arts is a term, now largely forgotten, encompassing
art forms that involve physical manipulation of a plastic medium by
moulding or modeling such as sculpture or ceramics. The term has also
been applied to all the visual (non-literary, non-musical) arts.[15][16]Materials that can be carved or shaped, such as stone or wood, concrete or steel, have also been included in the narrower definition, since, with appropriate tools, such materials are also capable of modulation.[citation needed] This use of the term "plastic" in the arts should not be confused with Piet Mondrian's use, nor with the movement he termed, in French and English, "Neoplasticism."
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Sculpture
Main article: Sculpture
Sculpture is three-dimensional artwork created by shaping or combining hard and/or plastic material, sound, and/or text and or light, commonly stone (either rock or marble), metal, glass, or wood. Some sculptures are created directly by finding or carving; others are assembled, built together and fired, welded, molded, or cast. Sculptures are often painted.[17] A person who creates sculptures is called a sculptor.Because sculpture involves the use of materials that can be moulded or modulated, it is considered one of the plastic arts. The majority of public art is sculpture. Many sculptures together in a garden setting may be referred to as a sculpture garden.
United States of America copyright definition of visual art
In the United States, the law protecting the copyright over a piece of visual art gives a more restrictive definition of "visual art". The following quote is from the Copyright Law of the United States of America- Chapter 1:[18]A “work of visual art” is —
(1) a painting, drawing, print or sculpture, existing in a single copy, in a limited edition of 200 copies or fewer that are signed and consecutively numbered by the author, or, in the case of a sculpture, in multiple cast, carved, or fabricated sculptures of 200 or fewer that are consecutively numbered by the author and bear the signature or other identifying mark of the author; or
(2) a still photographic image produced for exhibition purposes only, existing in a single copy that is signed by the author, or in a limited edition of 200 copies or fewer that are signed and consecutively numbered by the author.
A work of visual art does not include —
(A)(i) any poster, map, globe, chart, technical drawing, diagram, model, applied art, motion picture or other audiovisual work, book, magazine, newspaper, periodical, data base, electronic information service, electronic publication, or similar publication;
(ii) any merchandising item or advertising, promotional, descriptive, covering, or packaging material or container;
(iii) any portion or part of any item described in clause (i) or (ii);
(B) any work made for hire; or
(C) any work not subject to copyright protection under this title.
