
If you wanted
to create art, how would you do it? Would
you pick up a box of crayons and draw a picture of your house?
Could you use a box of watercolors to paint a beach you saw on vacation?
How about some clay to make a model of your cat?
Or some chalk for drawing bright flowers on your front sidewalk?
Art is anything you want it to be.
Perceiving
Expressing
Evaluating
Putting It All Into Context
How Do We Know That?
Every person can create art. No special talents or lessons are necessary.
All you need is an idea that you want to express.
Art can be happy or sad. It
can be a reflection of our surroundings and the people we see everyday.
Art is a way to show other people our thoughts and feelings. It is a means of expression that all people share.
As we grow, each of us learns to perceive, express, evaluate and
contextualize art in our own way.
Perceiving
Even very young children can perceive art.
Perceiving is seeing and identifying.
When we perceive art, we notice its most basic elements.
We see colors, shapes and whatever material the art is made from.
Perceiving art around us is the first step toward learning to create our
own art.
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Expressing
When we do create our own art, we are expressing ourselves.
Art begins with an idea or a picture that forms in our minds.
With a desire to express that idea to other people, we choose a way to
make the idea visual. An idea may
be visually expressed through drawing, painting, sculpting or many other mediums.
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Evaluating
Evaluating art is a little more complex than just perceiving it.
When we evaluate art, we really think about it.
We look at someone else’s artwork and wonder what it is and why they
created it. We wonder what ideas
they are trying to express.
When we evaluate other people’s art, we may even begin
to compare it to our own. This
helps us learn new ways to express our ideas.
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Putting It All Into Context
Contexualizing art takes the most knowledge and practice.
When we put a piece of art into a context, we put it into a category.
We think of that piece in terms of a specific style and technique.
We think about the meaning and importance of the style.
To put art into context, we must know a lot about different art forms.
We must know a little bit about individual artists and about styles and
movements. Contextualizing art
helps us learn more about its importance to the artists and to the people who
view it.
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| Detail of left section from Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Latte (1884-1886) |
How Do We Know That?
If
you went to the Art Institute of Chicago, you could look at a painting called Sunday
Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Georges Seurat painted it in 1884. When
you first perceive this painting, you will see an image of people having fun on
an island in the middle of the Seine River in Paris.
If you evaluate the painting a little more closely, you may notice that
the scene was created with thousands of tiny dots and slashes of paint.
To put the painting into context, you must know that Seurat was a famous
Pointillist. You may even want to
know that some critics thought his paintings could influence peoples’ moods
depending on the direction of the tiny paint slashes.
Paintings with upward slashes seemed to make people happy.
Paintings with downward slashes seemed to make people a little sad.
Knowing these things might encourage you to study the painting pretty
closely!
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