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When an artist creates a painting, he or she must
make many decisions. First
might come the decision of what to paint--a figure, a landscape, a
still life, an abstraction--then the decision of what medium
or material to use (e.g. oil paint, water color, or pastel), as
well as how to apply the medium (e.g. with a flat-headed or pointed
brush or a palette knife)--this is called the technique.
Besides these decisions, the artist decides what form
his subject and material will take.
For example, two artists might paint the same landscape, but
decide to paint the same hills with sharp or fuzzy contours and
with different colors. It
is these formal decisions that we will be studying in this
exercise.
You will be analyzing two paintings as part of this
assignment.
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Marcel
Duchamp
Nude
Descending a Staircase, No. 2
1912
Oil
on Canvas
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Gerhard
Richter
Women
Descending a Staircase
1965
Oil
on Canvas
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Instructions
1.
Use the terms listed below to help you determine the
differences between the two paintings shown above.
Feel free to add terms that you think are more precise.
Hint:
You may find that more than one descriptive term per category
(e.g. lines) applies to a painting.
2.
Do you think any of the artists' formal decisions is important
to the feeling or idea the paintings communicate?
I.
ELEMENTS (=
the most basic aspects of form)
- Lines: sharp or fuzzy; thick or thin; straight, jagged or
curved; choppy or smooth
- Shapes: natural or abstract; geometrical or organic; curved or
angular; soft-edged (fuzzy) or hard-edged (sharply defined), large
or small in relation to other shapes & the overall format?
- Direction:
orientation of lines and/or shapes oriented (vertical,
horizontal, diagonal, curved)
- Color:
- Does
the artist try to match the colors of the subject in nature or use
colors abstractly?
- Are
the colors warm (reds,
oranges, yellows) or cool
(blues, greens, purples)?
- Are
the colors bright (e.g.
a very red red) or dull (e.g. a muted red)?
- Does
the artist use complementary
pairs of colors (i.e. colors opposite one another on the color
wheel: red and green;
blue and orange; yellow and purple)?
- Does
the artist use primary
(red, yellow, blue), secondary
(orange, green, purple) or neutral
colors (browns, grays, whites, blacks)?
- Are
the values (degree of
lightness or darkness) predominantly light or dark or somewhere in
between? Does the
artist use a range of values?
- Texture: What is the surface quality of the paint itself or the
thing represented (i.e. imitated from the natural world)?
If you touched the surface of the paint or the thing
represented would it be smooth or rough, hard or soft, dry or wet,
coarse or fine?
II.
COMPOSITION or design (=
how the elements are put together)
- Balance: Are the
shapes arranged symmetrically
(the right and left halves of the painting are similar), asymmetrically
(each half is different), or somewhere in between? Does the visual weight of one side seem to equal the
other?
- Unity/variety: Is
the painting held together by the repetition
(of line, shape, color, value, or texture), by an underlying configuration
(e.g. shapes arranged in an oval or triangle, one line or
shape leading to another) or by continuity
(lines, shapes, colors leading from one part to another)?
Look for patterns both across the surface of the painting
and back into its apparent depth.
Does the artist vary the elements to achieve variety?
- Focal point: Does
the artist direct your attention to some particular part of the
painting (e.g. a certain figure) or disperse your attention? Is this accomplished by centering, directing objects
toward the focal point, contrasting color or light?
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