The
visual arts are
art forms that create works which are primarily
visual in nature, such as
ceramics,
drawing,
painting,
sculpture,
printmaking,
design,
crafts, and often modern visual arts (
photography,
video, and
filmmaking) and
architecture. These definitions should not be taken too strictly as many artistic disciplines (
performing arts,
conceptual art,
textile arts) involve aspects of the visual arts as well as arts of other types. Also included within the visual arts
[1] are the
applied arts[2] such as
industrial design,
graphic design,
fashion design,
interior design and
decorative art.
[3]
As indicated above, 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 art.
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.
[edit]Education and training
Training in the visual arts has generally been through variations of the
apprenticeand 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 a tertiary level. Visual arts have now become an elective subject in most education systems. (See also
art education.)
[edit]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
graphitepencils,
pen and ink,
inked brushes, wax
color pencils,
crayons,
charcoals,
pastels, and
markers. Digital tools which 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.
[edit]Painting
Mosaic of Battle of Issus
Painting taken literally is the practice of applying
pigmentsuspended in a carrier (or
medium) and a binding agent (a
glue) to a
surface (support) such as
paper,
canvas or a wall. However, when used in an artistic sense it means the use of this activity in combination with
drawing,
composition and, or, other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Painting is also used to express spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to
The Sistine Chapel to the human body itself.
[edit]Origins and early history
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.
Paintings of human figures can be found in the tombs of ancient Egypt. In the great temple of
Ramses II,
Nefertari, his queen, is depicted being led by
Isis.
[7] The Greeks contributed to painting but much of their work has been lost. One of the best remaining representations is the mosaic of the
Battle of Issus found at
Pompeiiwhich was probably based on a Greek painting. Greek and Roman art contributed to
Byzantine art in the 4th century BC which initiated a tradition in icon painting.
[edit]The Renaissance
Claude Monet: Déjeuner sur l'herbe (1866)
[edit]Dutch masters
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.
[edit]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]
Edvard Munch: The Scream (1893)
[edit]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]
[edit]Symbolism, expressionism and cubism
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]
[edit]Printmaking
Ancient Chinese engraving of female instrumentalists
Main article:
Printmaking
Printmaking is creating for artistic purposes an image on a matrix which 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.
Historically, the major techniques (also called media) involved are
woodcut,
line engraving,
etching,
lithography, and screenprinting (serigraphy, silkscreening) but there are many others, including modern digital techniques. Normally the surface upon which the print is printed is
paper, but there are exceptions, from cloth and
vellum to modern materials. Major printmaking traditions include that of Japan (
ukiyo-e).
[edit]European history
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 techniques for printing on cloth which had been 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]
[edit]Chinese Origin and Practice
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]
[edit]Development In Japan 1603-1867
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.
[edit]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,
chemical or
digital 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.)
[edit]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.
[edit]Computer art
Main article:
Computer art
Picture produced by Drawing Machine 2
Visual artists are no longer limited to
traditional art media. Computers have been used as an ever more common tool in the visual arts since the 1960s. Uses include the
capturing or creating of images and forms, the editing of those images and forms (including exploring multiple
compositions) and the final
rendering and/or
printing (including
3D printing).
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.
[edit]The Plastic arts
Main article:
Plastic arts
Plastic arts is a term, now largely forgotten, encompassing art forms which 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."
[edit]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.
