ART 100: Art Appreciation: Part II   

Instructor: Diane Weintraub           

Chapter Fourteen Architecture and Environmental Design

Reading assignment: Chapter fourteen, pages 229 - 252. Be sure to keep up with the reading assignment!

Architecture and environmental design are arts with great potential for enhancing our lives.

We find comfort in making our surroundings as beautiful as possible.

Architecture: Has a constant presence in our lives. Considered a necessity rather than an expressive statement. Actually, it is both.

Architecture is the art and science of designing and constructing buildings for practical, aesthetic, and symbolic purposes.

It grows out of basic human needs and therefore offers one of the clearest records of a society.

Architects address and integrate three key issues:

            Function: how a building is used.

Form: how it looks.

            Structure: how it stands up.

As an art and a science:

            Art: its expressive properties.

            Science: a physics problem, how it stands up.

a.       a supporting skeleton

b.      an outer skin

c.       operating equipment

Styles and Materials: availability and changing needs.

Post and beam: Prior to the 20^th century, two dominant forms were in use:

                        Post and lintel/beam

                        Arch systems including vaulting

                                    An arch rotated 180degrees is a dome

            Pointed arch and vault

            Truss and balloon frame construction: 19^th C. United States

            Cast Iron: Industrial Revolution

            Steel and reinforced concrete: 1890s

                        Form follows function: a total break with the past

                        The high-rise building

            Designing with nature

Envionmental Design: the design of communities and regions, from small gardens and parks to entire communities.

The art-making processes found in other disciplines apply to solving environmental design issues.            

Chapter Seven: Drawing

Reading assignment: Chapter seven, pages 112 – 125. Be sure to keep up with the reading assignment!

“The desire to draw is as natural as the desire to talk.”

Approaches to drawing: there are many

            Drawing from direct observation

            Drawing from the imagination

Purposes of drawing:

            As a personal notation, sketch, or record of something seen, remembered or imagined

            As a study for another work

            As an end in itself

Types of drawing media:

            Dry media:

                        Pencil, charcoal, conte crayon, and pastel

            Liquid media:

                        Black or colored inks with brush or pen, felt-tip pens

Chapter Eight: Painting

Reading assignment: Chapter eight, pages 126 – 138. Be sure to keep up with the reading assignment!

To many people in the Western world, art is painting.

Drawing is closely related to painting, and can be the basis for a painting.

The composition of paint:

            Pigment, or color

            Binder, or medium, which holds the pigment particles together

            Vehicle, which lets the pigment/binder mixture spread.

The support is what the work is painted on

The ground is the way in which the surface is prepared so that it’s ready to receive the paint.

Various painting media:

            Watercolor: pigment and gum arabic and water. The ground is paper.

                        Fluid, thin washes, white = the paper

            Gouache: opaque watercolor. Much older. White is mostly painted.

Tempera: Highly developed during the Middle Ages, usually on wooden panels. Egg yoke binder. This egg tempers is different than today’s cheap poster paints also called tempera.

Oil: Favored in the west for over 500 years. Better covering power, but can also be worked thin in glazes. Colors change little as they dry. Can be used on canvas = much lighter finished work which could be rolled and stored. Many approaches and styles of application.

Acrylic: pigments are suspended in an acrylic polymer medium. Fast drying and flexible = will not crack. Highly transparent when compared to oils. Rapid drying = layering.

Encaustic: pigments in hot bees wax.

Fresco: pigments suspended in water are applied to damp lime-plaster wall. Plaster dries fast so the entire painted wall must be worked in small areas.

Chapter Nine: Printmaking

Reading assignment: Chapter nine, pages 139 – 152. Be sure to keep up with the reading assignment! 

The term “printmaking” describes a variety of media developed to create multiple images.

Technologies for printmaking as well as papermaking came from China to Europe.

            Came to Europe to satisfy need for religious books.

Prints cost less that paintings because they are not one of a kind but multiples.

When a print is printer it is said to be “pulled.”

Editions of prints are numbered, for example 5/50, which mean that the print before you is number fifth in edition of 50. This print is the fifth one pulled.

The artist will pull some test prints to see how the print is progressing, called progressive proofs or “progs.”

When the artist gets the print to a final state some “artist’s proofs” are pulled which are not numbered as part of the edition, and are held by the artist (or given to others.)

Various Printmaking Techniques:

Relief: Cuts away all the parts of the printing surface except the part that prints, such as woodblock, wood engraving, linoleum cuts.

Intaglio: The opposite of relief, and where the ink is held in the surface that is cut into.

Some types of intaglio printing are engraving, drypoint, and etching. 

Lithography: Lithography uses a flat surface upon which an oil-based crayon or liquid

makes the image. The surface is wetted with water and the ink adheres to the image area.
 

Screenprinting: A modern refinement of the ancient art of stenciling. Also called silk screen printing or serigraphy.  

Chapter Twelve: Sculpture

Reading assignment: Chapter twelve, pages 194 - 211. Be sure to keep up with the reading assignment!

Sculpture exists in space as we do. The total experience of a sculpture is the sum of its surfaces and profiles. Even when touching is not permitted, the perceived tactile quality is an important part of the way we experience sculpture.

Freestanding and Relief Sculpture:

Sculpture meant to be seen from all sides is called in-the-round or freestanding.

A sculpture that is not freestanding but projects from a background surface is in relief.

            In low-relief (bas-relief) the projection form the surrounding surface is slight.

In high-relief more than half of the natural circumference of the object being depicted projects from the surface.

Methods:

Modeling with clay is an example of an additive method.

Casting is a substitution method involving three steps.

1.      A mold is taken from the original work.

2.      The original sculpture is removed from the mold and a casting liquid is poured.

3.      When the casting liquid is hardened the mold is removed.

Carving is a subtractive methods and an example is marble or wood.

Constructing or assembling: assemblage.

Kinetic sculpture: a sculpture that moves.

Mixed media: a term often used to describe a work uses many methods, rather than listing all of those methods.

Installation: artists bring into a specific location items with symbolic meaning.

Site-specific works: sculpture designed for a specific place. 

Chapter Ten: Camera Arts and Computer Imaging

Reading assignment: Chapter ten, pages 153 - 183. Be sure to keep up with the reading assignment!

Camera arts: includes photography, film, or television.

Photography: Can be a practical tool or and art media. Has had a very powerful impact on the way we see.

            Things to remember about photography:

1.      Before development of the camera, only royalty or the rich could afford to have their picture taken.

2.      From the beginning portrait photography was heavily influenced by portrait painting.

3.      Nineteenth-century photographers often looked to painting for direction. At the same time painters looked to photography both to see what was being done as well as using photos instead of sketches for preliminary visual notations.

Things to remember about photography as an art form:

1.      In the early days of photography, the public was reluctant to put photography on the same level as fine art, especially painting. 

2.      Today, photography is commonly considered an art form.

3.      One of photography’s strengths is its ability to capture a moment in time.

Various approaches to fine art photography:

1.      Photography and social change.

2.      Abstract photography.

3.      Photography and color.

4.      Photo montage

5.      Digital photography and photo editing

Film: Real moving images. Things to remember:

1.      Not taken seriously at first, and just considered a novelty.

2.      What we are actually seeing is only the illusion of movement caused by the exposure of a rapid sequence of film images.

3.      Film is time based and rhythmic which makes it unique amongst the art forms. In film, sequencing is important.

4.      Film editing is the process by which several shots are first selected from raw footage and then assembled into a sequence. The cutting ratio tells how much film footage is actually used as compared to all the film that was shot.

5.      Common techniques used in film making are:

a.       Fading in

b.      Fading out

c.       Close-up

d.      Longshot

e.       Montage