Describe the Size Medium and Processed Used Art Value

An Art History Glossary for Artists

Any visual creative person knows they don't have to say a word when it comes to describing their fine art. Sure, let the art speak for itself. But it doesn't hurt to have a glossary of art terms that could be practical to any given slice of art. That's why we've compiled an art history glossary of must-know vocab to employ when describing art. It volition come in handy when yous are at the museum or watching the latest art documentary, or describing your own paintings and drawings.

Abstraction

Also known as nonrepresentational or nonobjective art. The heyday of abstraction was the early 20th century and artists who employ abstraction pull visual forms away from the "real" world through simplification, stylization or distillation of forms. Abstraction'due south language is the language of color, texture, gesture, line and scale to proper name a few. Artists similar Jackson Pollock typified the Abstruse Expressionist art movement.

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Alla prima

An Italian term directly translated equally "at first attempt" but in the art world is known as an oil painting technique in which the artist paints in one go or moisture-into-wet. The technique requires the creative person to work fast and decisively before the surface paint dries. Also called direct painting and results tend to be described as bold, expressive and painterly.

Allegory

In literature, an apologue is an extended metaphor in which abstract ideas, often relating to moral or political pregnant, are conveyed through language and storytelling. In art, an allegory is conveyed through imagery and that imagery takes on symbolic meaning. For example, Sandro Botticelli'sPrimavera is an emblematic painting almost the oncoming of Spring and passage of time. Interestingly, many artists including Jan Vermeer and Artemisia Gentileschi have painted allegories of painting, extended metaphors on the nature, preoccupations and influencers of artists and their work.

Appropriation

The act of taking, in this case, works by some other artist and putting them into a new context. Commonly this is done without the permission of person the original idea came from. Information technology results in recontextualizing the "onetime" work and the creation of a "new" art piece. Artists and lawyers dispute where the line of permissible appropriation is drawn only usually complete appropriation is looked down upon while quoting or riffing off a work is acceptable in the fine art world and goes back for centuries.

Avant-garde

A French term that means "accelerate guard." It'southward a term that can be applied to artists and artworks as well as art movements every bit a whole. Information technology is usually a stand-in phrase for art that is experimental, unusual, and forward-thinking.

Brushwork

If you lot are looking at a painting, likely you are looking at an object made with the use of a brush. At that place is a multifariousness of brush techniques artists have used and evolved over the centuries in lodge to handle and apply paint including scumbling, dragging, and stippling among others. It besides refers to the size, shape and texture of the strokes.

Chiaroscuro

An Italian term that means "light-dark" and is commonly applied when at that place is a strong, dramatic contrast of light and nighttime in a painting or drawing. Artists use chiaroscuro to create a convincing sense of book and dimensionality in their work. Photography can be described with the term but it harkens back originally to Renaissances and the works of Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci.

Crucifixion of St. Peter by Caravaggio

Color Theory

Artists for centuries take organized, reorganized and made rules around color perception and colour mixing. In nowadays day, students of art are taught about the colour wheel; principal, secondary and tertiary colors; and color relationships or the visual effects of color combinations.

Composition

The term broadly applied to how the elements of an artwork are arranged. Certain strategies for limerick have been around for hundreds of years like the Golden Mean and the Rule of Thirds.

Contrapposto

An Italian term that ways counterpoise and describes when a human effigy's weight is balanced more on one leg than the other, resulting in shoulders and arms off-axis to hips and legs. The stance is near famous in sculpture and goes dorsum to the classical ages.

The contrapposto of Donatellos bronze David clearly displayed in these three views of the sculpture.

Distortion

In painting and cartoon, distortion means irresolute the visual advent of a figure or object — pulling, twisting, stretching and changing something for expressive purpose.

Figurative Art

Normally this is a term generally applied to paintings or sculptures. Specifically, it ways the work is representational, in contrast to abstract art.

Genre

A term with a confusing backstory in the visual arts. Historically it meant a painting of a person or people in everyday situations who were simply not identified. But it also encompasses still life painting, animal painting, and landscape and marine painting.

Glazing

Early Masters such as Rembrandt applied multiple layers of transparent pigment to produce the deep, glowing hues and darks that came to typify their work, according to author Michael Wilcox of the bestselling painting techniques book,Glazing. According to Wilcox, darks seethed with hidden color. The range of rich hues employed by these earlier painters gave a mysterious depth and intensity to their piece of work, a richness and luminosity that but the glazing techniques tin can requite.

Impressionism

Impressionism was the 19th century art movement known for artists who produced paintings that were of everyday scenes, painted with small just visible brushstrokes, with an emphasis on the accurate depiction of calorie-free and its child-bearing nature.

Impression, soleil levant by Claude Monet

Mixed media

An artwork in which more than i medium or material has been incorporated is described equally mixed media. Aggregation and collage are pop mixed media fine art forms.

Motif

A motif is an element, blueprint or design in an artwork that is often used repeatedly. An artist can as well use a motif once again and over again in a body of work and fifty-fifty throughout their career.

Narrative

In essence, narrative is visual storytelling. In painting and drawing, images are static so artists over time have come up with strategies to deal with that reality, from depicting unmarried scenes of a story to multiple scenes (in which characters appear more than one time) or a panoramic, in which multiple events have place in a single scene.

Perspective

At that place are ii main types of perspective strategies to make two-dimensional forms look three dimensional.Linear perspective conveys the illusion of space with receding parallel lines coming together at a vanishing bespeak.Atmospheric perspective addresses distance by changing color tones and the level of detail employed to paint or draw an object.

Photorealism

The genre or creative movement that encompasses painting and drawing that reproduce images every bit realistically as possible. This is also the term for a group of American artists who painted in just such a way in the 1960s and 1970s including Chuck Close.

Plein air

The human activity of painting outdoors in the city or landscape equally opposed creating art in a studio. It is a French term and nigh relevant to the work of the artists of the Barbizon School, Hudson River School and the Impressionists. Today, many gimmicky artists place themselves as plein air painters, artists who paint mostly or exclusively outdoors.

Artists Sketching in the White Mountains by Winslow Homer

Proportion

The human relationship to the size betwixt one chemical element and another or between an element and an entire work. To make an artwork that is more than realistic, certain proportion ranges take to be met and have been codified, which means there are rules out there (going all the way back to Durer) that an artist tin can learn. Playing with or altering proportions allows an artist to veer away from realism into more expressive territory.

Realism

Oftentimes chosen naturalism also. Mostly speaking, this is the attempt of a visual artist to attempt to describe people, places, and objects realistically. This means avoiding stylization and artificiality.

Scale

The size of objects or depicted objects equally they relate to ane some other. Size impacts meaning and expression. Artists will use scale to convey importance or significance. Consider miniatures in contrast to life-size to over life-size objects.

Sfumato

A painting technique that describes the soft transition between colors. TheMona Lisa, arguably the near famous painting of all fourth dimension, is a key example of sfumato, which derives from the Italian discussion for fume. Leonardo da Vinci described information technology as: "without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane." In English, information technology has come to mean softened or blurred edges and lines when applied to artworks.

Symbolism

Symbols tin be personal only historically they refer to broadly accepted and understood references. In painting or drawing, this is applied to visual references, usually objects that stand in for ideas or meanings. Symbols tin can exist religious, political or cultural. Some contemporary artists operate only within the premises of symbols that they often times create themselves — their own visual languages as it were. When an artwork is all or generally well-nigh the conversation that takes place betwixt symbols, the result is an allegory.

Texture

In painting, there are and then many means texture tin can and has been manipulated. Celebrated European artists created paintings with glassy, texture-less surfaces. Modern painters embraced texture, whether allowing pigment to seep into a surface or build upwardly onto information technology. Impasto is the process or technique of thickly applying pigment to a surface.

Theme

An overall thought that an artwork or trunk of work conveys. An artist can convey a theme in many means — with symbolism, with scale and proportion, with formal aspects of their pursuit like color, line and texture.

Trompe 50'oeil

The treachery of images indeed! This is a French term for "deceiving the centre" and is applied to the painting techniques employed to create an optical illusion of reality, using perspective techniques and devices like breaking the picture plane–so an object looks like it is bulging out of the surface of a painting.

The Treachery of Images by René Magritte

Underpainting

The painting technique of creating a monochromatic version of an image and then allowing information technology to dry. Then an creative person uses transparent and semitransparent layers of pigment known equally glazes to continue the painting, all the while allowing parts of the underpainting to peek through, increasing the illusion of depth a painting has.

Value

The lightness or darkness of a color or hue. Many artists argue value is the most important aspect of a realistic painting — more important than color itself.

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Source: https://www.artistsnetwork.com/art-history/art-history-glossary/

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