ARTS

• RECORDS OF MAN’S QUEST FOR ANSWERS TO THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

HE ASKS ABOUT HIMSELF AND ABOUT LIFE
• MAN’S EXPERIENCES, HIS VALUES, HIS SENTIMENTS, HIS IDEALS, HIS GOALS
• defining art is just like defining life itself.
Functions
• Create places for human purpose
• Create extraordinary version of ordinary objects
• Record & commemorate
• Tangible form to the unknown
• Form feeling and ideas
• See the world in new ways

Subject of Art
• What is it?
• What does it show?
• Subject of an art refers to any person, object, scene, or event represented or described in an art
work
• Some arts have subject (representational), Arts with a subject
• Refers to any person, object, scene or event
• Painting, sculpture, graphic arts, literature, theatre arts
• others do not (non-representational), Arts without a subject
• Music, architecture, and many functional arts

• Non-objective arts do not represent descriptions, stories or references to identifiable objects or

symbols
• They appeal directly to the senses primarily because of the satisfying organization of
their sensuous and expressive elements
• Most musical pieces are not imitations of natural sounds, but we enjoy listening to them
because the sounds have been pleasingly arranged and because they evoke certain
emotional responses in us
Ways of representing subject
Realism
• Things are depicted in the way they normally appear in nature
Abstraction
• The process of simplifying and/or reorganizing objects and elements according to the demands of
artistic expression
• In some abstract works, enough of a likeness has been retained to represent real things.
• in others, the original objects have been reduced to simple geometric shapes
• Hard to identify
Distortion
• When the figures have been so arranged that proportions differ noticeably from natural
measurements
• Could also mean twisting, stretching, deforming the natural shape of the object.

Kinds of Subject
1. Landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes
• Seascapes and landscapes have been the favorite subjects of Chinese and Japanese
painters
• Observe nature, meditate lengthily on its eternal qualities and paint it in its varying
moods
• Fernando Amorsolo romanticized Philippine landscapes, turning the rural areas into
idyllic places where agrarian problems are virtually unknown.
2. Still Lifes
• Groups of inanimate objects arranged in an indoor setting
Examples are:
• Flower and fruit arrangements
 • Dishes of food on a dining table
• Pots and pans on a kitchen table
• Musical instruments or musical sheets

• Artists of today are generally not so much interested in the realistic portrayal of the objects as
they are in the exciting arrangement and combinations of the objects’ shapes and colors.
• Cubists such as Cezanne and Picasso’s still lifes are deliberately flattened out and
simplified so that a unique visual effect are achieved.
• Cubism - Style of the 20th century, created principally by picasso and braque
• Emphasized the flat, two-dimensional surface of the picture plane
• Rejected the traditional techniques of perspective
• Refuted time-honoured theories that art should imitate nature
• Cubists presented a new reality in paintings that depicted radically fragmented objects
3. Animals
• Represented by artist from almost every age and place
• Earliest known paintings are representations of animals on the walls of caves
• The carabao has been a favorite subject of Filipino artists
• The maranaws have an animal form called sarimanok as their proudest prestige symbol.
• Animals have also been used as symbols in conventional religious art.
• Dove – Holy Spirit of the Trinity
• Fish and the lamb are symbols of Christ
• Phoenix, of the resurrection
• The peacock, of immortality through Christ
o (from the notion popularized in medieval bestiaries that the peacock’s flesh was not
subject to decay)
4. Portraits
• Realistic likeness of a person in a sculpture, painting, drawing or print
• It need not be a photographic likeness
• It does not have to be beautiful, but it must be truthful
5. Figures
• Sculptor’s chief subject has traditionally been the human body, nude or clothed
• Grace and ideal proportions of the human form were captured in religious sculpture by
the Ancient Greeks.
• To them, physical beauty was the symbol of moral and spiritual perfection
• Thus, they portrayed their god and goddesses as possessing perfect human shapes
6. Everyday Life
 Paintings of artists based on their observation of people going about their usual ways,
performing their usual tasks
Examples:
• Rice threshers
• Cockfighters
• Candle vendors
• Street musicians
• Children at play

Elements of Art
1. Color
 artists use color to convey atmosphere and mood
 Color is what we see because of reflected light.
 Light contains different wavelengths of energy that our eyes and brain "see" as different
colors.
 When light hits an object, we see the colored light that reflects off the object.
Example:
Rouen Cathedral Series (1893-1894) by Claude Monet
Sea Battle by Wassily Kandinsky, raised in Odessa, Russia, learned to play the cello and
piano as a child. As an artist, he drew connections between art and music and believed
 that colors and shapes could affect our mood. Show students Improvisation 31 (Sea
Battle)
• Warm colors—reds, yellows, oranges, and red-violets—are those of fire and the sun.
They appear to project.
• Cool colors—blues, blue-greens, and blue-violets—are those of ice and the ocean. They
appear to recede.
• Colorful Language
• Primary colors of paint are red, yellow, and blue. They cannot be made by mixing other
colors but when combined will create all the other colors. (Note that there is a different
set of primaries when it comes to mixing light, not paint. The primary light colors—the
ones that are used in your TV and computer monitor—are red, blue, and green.)
• Secondary paint colors (green, purple, and orange) are obtained by mixing equal amounts
of two primaries. Tertiary paint colors (red-orange, red-violet, yellow-green, yellow-
orange, blue-green, and blue-violet) are made by mixing a primary color with its adjacent
secondary color.
• Complementary colors are those positioned opposite one another on the color wheel: for
example, red and green; yellow and violet; blue and orange. When placed side by side,
complementary colors intensify each other.
• Warm colors—reds, yellows, oranges, and red-violets—are those of fire and the sun.
They appear to project. Cool colors—blues, blue-greens, and blue-violets—are those of
ice and the ocean. They appear to recede.
• Pigments are intensely colored compounds—some organic, some inorganic—that are
used to produce the color in paints and dyes. In paint they are finely powdered and mixed
with a medium such as oil.
• Hue is synonymous with color (black and white are not hues).
• Shade is a hue produced by the addition of black.
• Tint is a hue produced by the addition of white.
• The saturation of a color is its degree of purity.
• Modeling is the creation of a sense of depth; it can be achieved by gradations of dark and
light or through color contrast.
• Optical mixing is the process by which the eyes visually blend brushstrokes of pure
colors to create a new intermediate tone.
• A palette is the selection of colors found in a work of art; the word also refers to the thin
board on which an artist holds and mixes pigments.

2. Line
 Line is a mark made using a drawing tool or brush.
 There are many types of lines: thick, thin, horizontal, vertical, zigzag, diagonal, curly,
curved, spiral, etc. and are often very expressive.
 Lines are basic tools for artists—though some artists show their lines more than others.
Some lines in paintings are invisible—you don't actually see the dark mark of the line.
But they are there, shown in the way the artist arranges the objects in the painting.
Example:
• Artist Frank Stella is a racing fan. This metal relief painting, Jarama II, is named after an
automobile racetrack outside Madrid, Spain. Here, Stella used winding, curving strips of
metal painted in bright, dynamic colors to forcefully carry the motion and excitement of
professional racing.
3. Shape
 Shape is a flat area surrounded by edges or an outline.
 Artists use all kinds of shapes.
 Geometric shapes are precise and regular, like squares, circles, rectangles, and
triangles. They are often found in human-made things, like building and machines
 biomorphic shapes are found in nature like leaves, flowers, clouds—things that
grow, flow, and move.
 The term biomorphic means: life-form (bio=life and morph= form)
 Biomorphic shapes are often rounded and irregular, unlike most geometric shapes.
 Example:
Henri Matisse An artist that loved to explore the possibilities of mixing geometric and
biomorphic shapes was Henri Matisse. In the last few decades of his artistic career, he
developed a new form of art-making: the paper cut-out. Still immersed in the power of color, he
devoted himself to cutting colored papers and arranging them in designs. “Instead of drawing an
outline and filling in the color…I am drawing directly in color,” he said. Matisse was drawing with
scissors!
Matisse enjoyed going to warmer places and liked to watch sunlight shimmering on the sea.
He often traveled to seaports along the French Mediterranean, also visiting Italy, North Africa,
and Tahiti. Beasts of the Sea is a memory of his visit to the South Seas. In this work of art,
Matisse first mixed paint to get all the brilliant colors of the ocean. Then he cut this paper into
shapes that reminded him of a tropical sea. Lastly, he arranged these biomorphic shapes vertically
over rectangles of yellows, greens, and purples to suggest the watery depths of the undersea
world.
4. Form
 Forms are shapes in three dimensions:
 Circle —> Sphere
Square —> Cube
Rectangle —> Rectangular prism
Triangle —> Pyramid
 Forms can be geometric or biomorphic.
 Sculpture is the most obvious place to see form, or three-dimensional shape, in art.
5. Texture
 Texture is the look and feel of a surface.
 Painters have many ways to create different textures.
 They use different sized and shaped brushes: everything from tiny pointed brushes to flat,
wide brushes.
 They can also use other tools—special knives, sponges, even fingers—to put paint on
canvas.
 What are some ways that artists create texture?
 They brush paint on in watery strokes and thick drips.
 They put paint down in short, fat dabs and long, sleek strokes.
 They twirl their brushes to make circles and curls.
 They apply paint in thick layers that stick out from the canvas.
 They put different colors on top of each other.
 They mix in sand, dirt, or other materials into the paint.
 They add white highlights to make things look shiny.
 They scratch through paint to show colors underneath.