Listen to part of a talk in an Art Appreciation class.
Professor (female)
In order for art to communicate, to appeal to the emotions or the intellect, it has to combine various visual elements to express meaning or emotion. It's really the visual components of the work, things like color, texture, shape, lines and how these elements work together that tell us something about the work.Artists combine and manipulate these visual elements to express a message or to create a mood. Think about how a painter might use colors, for example. You all know from experience that different colors appeal in different ways to the senses and can convey different meanings. An artist chooses certain colors to evoke a particular mood and make powerful statements. The color red, for example, is a strong color, and can conjure up strong emotions such as extreme joy or excitement or even anger. Blue, on the other hand, is considered a cool color. Blue colors tend to have a calming effect on viewers. Another visual element important to art is texture. By texture I mean surface quality or feel of the work, its smoothness or roughness or softness. Now, of course, in some types of art the texture is physical. It can be actually be touched by the fingers. But in painting, for example, texture can be visual. The way an artist paints certain areas of the painting can create the illusion of texture, an object’s smoothness or roughness or softness. A rough texture can evoke stronger emotions and strength while a smooth texture is more calming and less emotional.As I said earlier, artists often combine elements to convey a message about the work. Take a painting that, say, uses a lot of strong colors like reds and oranges and uses brush stokes that are broad, wide sweeping brush strokes that suggest a rough texture. Well, these elements together can convey a wilder more chaotic emotion in the viewer than, more than say a painting with tiny, smooth brush strokes and soft or pale colors. Artists use these visual effects and the senses they arouse to give meaning to their work."
Using points and examples from the lecture, explain the importance of visual elements in painting.
The artists usually combine or manipulate some visual elements like colors and texture to convey a message or create a mood for an art work. According to the professor, one of this is the use of color. Colors appeal in different ways to the senses and thus can convey/communicate meanings, so artists use different colors to evoke different emotions. For example, red is a strong color, and artists thus use it to evoke strong emotions like anger and excitement, while blue, a cool color, has a calming effect on people. The other is the texture of a painting, an visual illusion created by the artists like roughness or softness. This can also evoke different emotions. Roughness stimulates stronger emotion, while smoothness the other way round. When artists combine these two elements together, they can create a painting that expresses wilder and more chaotic emotions by using red, orange as well as wide sweeping brushstrokes, or they can create a cooler painting with pale colors like blue and soft brush strokes. (170 words)
