Developing a Way to Talk About Art

We are surrounded by images, but how do we read visual information? It is impossible to recognize, understand, or communicate how visual art affects you without language. This requires you to build up your vocabulary for the arts; you need to learn how to describe art. What terms, phrases, concepts, and approaches do you use to think critically about visual images?

That being said, it seems rather inadequate to describe artwork by simply saying, “I like this painting.” WHY? What is it that first catches your eye, and keeps your interest when you look at a piece of artwork? Is it the color, the size, the texture, what the piece is about?

You can be surrounded by books, but if you do not know how to read, then you will be lost by the pages of text around you. lost? We are surrounded by images, from television, to magazines, to the internet. Do we really understand how to read the information in these images, or are we lost? How do we build visual literacy?

Consider these ideas when thinking about how to read images: Relationships among words, images and objects in the real world The distinctions among form and content in art The idea of representation Conventions in art Iconography

refer Both an image and a word can refer to something we see in the real world, but neither is the thing itself. Words can strongly influence how we read images. We are drawn to reading words; we understand text as a form of communication, and we automatically look to words for meaning and clues.

subject matter The subject matter of a piece of artwork is what the image literally depicts. For example, the subject matter of Magritte’s painting is a pipe. content The content of a piece of artwork is what the image means. This may be far more complicated than the subject matter. The content of Magritte’s painting invites us to think critically about the representations that we see all around us in daily life.

Words and images are two different systems that we use to describe the world. Words are an abstract system: they communicate information in a way that bears no physical resemblance to the object. For example, the word - “COFFEE” the “C-O-F-F-E-E,” looks nothing like the beverage, yet it still refers to it. Images represent the world, and traditionally one of the main goals of images has been to capture a picture of the way the natural world appears.

Some works of art better resemble the natural world than others. Some artists do not make art with the goal of accurately representing the natural world. A vocabulary had developed to describe how closely, or not, the image resembles visual reality itself.

We understand what both things mean, and we agree that they mean the same thing. The picture is representational – it represents the way the drink actually looks. The letters are abstract – they look nothing like the way the drink does in the real world, but we understand that they refer to it.

RepresentationalAbstractNon-objective

Generally, we distinguish a work of art as belonging to one of three groups: Representational Representational Abstract Abstract Nonrepresentational (or Nonobjective) Nonrepresentational (or Nonobjective)

Representational recognizable Representational art portrays natural objects in a recognizable way. The work actually looks like what it represents. Abstract Abstract art is still representational art, but it is an abstraction of reality. The artist uses this abstraction to make the viewer more aware of the formal elements, yet the image still refers to something recognizable.

Pablo Picasso Weeping Woman 1937

Francis Bacon Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon 1958

Nonrepresentational, or nonobjective works of art do not refer to the natural or objective world at all. form. These works of art are primarily concerned with questions of form. Form is the overall structure of a work of art. This is generally opposed to the overall content of a work of art, but all form has meaning, and with nonobjective art, the form is the meaning.

Our understanding of a work of art is highly dependent on understanding its cultural context. Without considering or respecting cultural context, we make ourselves vulnerable to understanding the artwork only through our own cultural prejudices.

iconography. Within understanding the artistic goals of different cultures, we can begin to examine an individual culture’s iconography. Iconography is a system of visual images, the meaning of which is widely understood by a given culture or cultural group. symbols These visual images are symbols, that is, they represent more than their literal meaning.