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Formal Elements of Artwork

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Formal Elements of Artwork

Introduction

Formal elements of artwork refer to stylistic features that artists employ to effectively

pass message to their audience. The rudiments of art and ideologies of design are the vital pieces

of an artwork. Color, shape, space, texture and value are the components of art that make up an

artwork. These tools have been employed over artistic ages by artists to create their artworks.

This paper explores the artistic elements used by artists through the art movements with relevant

artworks provided to support the thoughts.

The age of positivism

Positivism is a philosophical theory and tendency that began with Comte's works, who

also founded and systematized the subject of sociology. Even though positivist concept has been

a recurring topic in Western thinking, the contemporary approach was developed in the early

nineteenth century and it had great influences in the 20th century artistic work based on the

connection embodied from the elements artist used to create their paintings. Positivism's

fundamental claims are (1) all realistic familiarity is based on "positive" evidence from

experience, and (2) pure math and logic are beyond the domain of reality.

Vincent Van Gogh was a devoted artist whose paintings had vibrant colors and

expressive emotions. To convey movement or rhythm, he utilized broad, expressive

brushstrokes. This is because rhythm is a design principle. For instance, Van Gogh's most

renowned painting, Starry Night, epitomizes his unique style where the composition is depicted

by the night sky of the Starry Night painting filled with swirling clouds, sparkling stars, and a

beautiful crescent moon. The artist’s impressionist painting style and his strong use of oils and

paintbrushes influences works of Piet Mondrian where he largely used straight lines, basic
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colors, and black, white, and gray were his go-to pairings with the paintings representing formal

purity that reflects the artist's spiritual conviction in a harmonious world (Анацька, 2021). This

is evident from his Along the River Gein painting.

Impressionism

Impressionism was a prominent movement that began in France, first in art and then in

music. The artwork of a group of painters who shared a set of linked methods and procedures

between roughly 1867 and 1886 is known as an Impressionist painting. The endeavor to

precisely and realistically depict visual reality in terms of transitory impacts of light and color is

by far the most prominent feature of Impressionism in painting. In music, this meant using a

flood of sound rather than a rigid formal framework to express a concept or impression.

Claude Monet, a well-known painter whose work influenced Monet and many others in the

group throughout the 1860s, embraced the Impressionist style. The formal elements of his

artwork, particularly on the Impressionist paintings of water lilies (nymphéas) made over the last

thirty years of his life exhibited his exceptional plein-air painting ability, texture and tone as well

as his sense of color, color wheel and understanding of light. This has been seen over the 20th

century artistic works that give appreciation to these fundamental art elements as presented by

Claude Monet (Анацька, 2021). For instance, Georgia O'Keeffe is among the first female painter

to achieve recognition in New York's art scene in the 1920s, and she was instrumental in the

development of contemporary art in America. Her paintings of flowers and arid landscapes are

her most well-known works. She mastered the fundamental components of art: line, color, and

composition which were first employed by Claude Monet in presenting his arts. Her influence

was on creating boundaries in her work sometimes literally with lines and shapes racing over the

edge of the canvas, while managing to preserve a feeling of stability to make aesthetically
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fascinating pieces. The ability to work in a range of media—pastel, charcoal, watercolor, and oil

—combined with her eye for line, color, and composition—made her one of the most influential

artists of the twentieth century but pioneered in the 19th century artists (Анацька, 2021).

Progress and Its Discontents

To begin, I can only regard development—technological, political, social, moral, as a

goal of human activity, and because development has no consent or agenda of its own and is

dependent on what individuals may or may not do, it is neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with

something. Progress is a relatively new idea that isn't universally accepted (Fuller, 2019). I'm not

sure how much of the concept is still general to the West and how much of it is part of the

intellectual equipment of only a small portion of mankind. Before the Enlightenment, it solely

denoted onward movement in time or space; the moral, technological, or political change was

confined to such free thinkers as Descartes.

Post-Impressionism

The Post-Impressionists disapproved Impressionism's stress on the impulsive and realistic

depiction of light and color instead of drawing effect from previous art or historical and mythical

subjects; they depicted contemporary landscapes and contemporary aspects. Painters of this

period retained to employ vivid colors, a thick layering of paint, and realistic content knowledge,

but they were more likely to emphasize geometrical patterns, distort forms for emotional effect,

and use odd and apparently random colors. This influences the artistic paintings in the 20th

century by prominent artists. For instance, Pablo Ruiz Picasso, a Spanish painter and sculptor’s

works consists of nothing but elemental lines, shapes and colors, like Pollock's method “drip

technique”, classically, this entails spilling paint directly from a can or along a paintbrush onto a

horizontally positioned canvases. (Анацька, 2021).

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Toward Abstraction

Kandinsky's unique style started to take shape about 1909. He mostly worked in Murnau

and Munich, where he started to combine shapes, lines, and shades into a "symbolic imagery"

capable of expressing broad concepts and evoking strong emotions. He believed this new

"language" would be as successful as the abstract "language" he had found in music. Kandinsky

started to consider painting as an alternate road to spiritual truth about this time, and he started to

exclude precise aspects from his paintings. He started to incorporate vast swaths of bright color

to elicit feelings connected with classical music and to elicit responses that the careful use of

certain colors might elicit. Kandinsky believed he had identified a spiritual truth in abstraction

that was much stronger because it was not connected to the outside universe an alternative song

for the senses. This is largely observed in contemporary artworks such as from Frida Kahlo’s

Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) and The Broken Column', 1944 (Broude, 2018).

Fauvism

Fauvism is a painting movement that began in France in the twentieth century and thrived

there. To produce blast on the painting, Fauve artists utilized pure, bright color violently poured

directly from the paint tubes. The Fauves, like the Impressionists before them, painted straight

from nature, but their works were imbued with a powerful emotional reaction to the things

depicted (Broude, 2018). They initially showed together in 1905, sharing Matisse's interest in the

expressive role of color in paintings. Each aspect of a landscape is translated into pure color in

Derain's Fauvist paintings that he painted with short, powerful brushstrokes. The frenzied swirls

of vivid color in Vlaminck's paintings owe their existence to van Gogh's expressive force.

Cubism
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Cubism is a well-known twentieth-century visual arts movement started by painters Pablo

Picasso and Georges Braque, mostly in Paris. Traditional perspective, subtle shading, modeling,

and chiaroscuro processes, as well as long-held notions that art should represent nature, were all

abandoned in favor of the Cubist approach, which emphasized the image plane's flat, two-

dimensional surface. The emphasis of this phase's works is on the synthesis or combining, of

forms in the image. The use of color is prominent in these pieces, and the forms, while fractured

and flat, are bigger and much more ornamental. For instance, the flat, two-dimensional surface of

the picture plane as portrayed in Houses at l'Estaque (1908) by Georges Braque is evident also in

Henry Moore’s art pieces (Broude, 2018).

Art between the Wars

The Modern Art and Ideas series was founded on the idea that the growth of art is more

complicated than a succession of hermetic forms; instead, it is a complex matrix of intellectual,

social, and historical factors that have all had a role in the evolution of art.

Dada

Dada was a reaction to the war's horrors and ignorance that erupted in Zurich during

World War Art, poetry, and performance by Dada artists. The conflict called into question every

element of a society capable of initiating and then extending a war, including art with a goal to

demolish conventional art ideas and replace them with new ones. The Dadaists and the Dada

movement did not back down from experimenting with different mediums, as Duchamp's

readymade demonstrate. For example, Jean Arp investigated the art of collage and the possibility

for randomness in its production. Man-Ray’s experimentation with photography and airbrushing

as methods of separating the artist's hand from the work and so including accidental cooperation

largely used in contemporary artistic works (Fedorowich, 2017).

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Surrealism

Surrealism arose from the earlier Dada movement, which produced anti-art works that

defied reason on purpose before World War I; however, Surrealism focused on positive

expression rather than negative. The movement was developed in response to the damage caused

by "rationalism," which had previously dominated European culture and politics and culminated

in the tragedies of World War I (Austin, 2018). This is evident from René Magritte’s artworks

that he terms as visible images that conceal nothing, but evoke mystery such as the Treachery of

Images of 1929. His art featured common objects in unexpected situations and juxtapositions,

challenges human vision and forces the audience to examine things they often take for granted

which is largely embodied by contemporary artists. He developed pieces that reflect a sense of

mystery defining most of Surrealist work by combining linguistic and visual signals in most

artistic works in the 20th century (Paquette et al., 2017).

Conclusion

Formal elements of art have had great influence in art movement and developments

particularly the 1900 artistic elements. They were used together and arranged in various art work

to influences ho the final paintings will regarded. Their vitality cannot be overlooked in the art

development and advancement.

References

Austin, E. L. (2018). The Specter of Races: Latin American Anthropology and Literature

between the Wars by Anke Birkenmaier. Hispanófila, 182(1), 183-184.

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Broude, N. (2018). Miriam Schapiro and “Femmage”: Reflections on the Conflict Between

Decoration and Abstraction in Twentieth-Century Art. In Feminism and art history (pp.

314-329). Routledge.

Fedorowich, K. (2017). Unfit for heroes: reconstruction and soldier settlement in the Empire

between the wars. Manchester University Press.

Fuller, S. (2019). Philosophy of science and its discontents. Routledge.

Paquette, J., Beauregard, D., & Gunter, C. (2017). Positivism as cultural policy: art and social

change in the works of Comte and Saint-Simon. Modern & Contemporary France, 25(1),

15-30.

Анацька, Н. В. (2021). PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF

ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE FROM THE RENAISSANCE ERA TO

POSITIVISM. Sciences of Europe, (73-2), 41-45.