Rubens Painting Line Color Hue Balance Form and Perspective Discussion
Week 4: Rubens
Line, color, hue, balance, form and perspective were some of the key concepts covered in this week’s tutorial. Use the example of a painting by Peter Paul Rubens and discuss how one or more of this week’s key concepts are featured in the painting.
Identify the painting by title, and include citations for any material you’ve researched.
Week 4: Lesson
Table of Contents
The Visual Arts
The Marriage of Figaro
Mozart’s prolific career is punctuated by his charismatic operas. The Marriage of Figaro is one of the most often performed operas; its lively music and irreverent humor have delighted audiences for over two centuries. Feel free to click the Play button below and enjoy this piece as you read this week’s lecture.
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Transcript
A Closer Look at the Visual Arts
Art seeks to communicate, and it often communicates ideas that are invaluable to the study of man’s intellectual evolution. Over the course of our natural history, mankind has developed methods of self-expression that traverse symbolic and verbal language, which have been categorized (sometimes loosely) as art. W. H. Janson, an art historian, once asserted that, “Defining art is about as troublesome as defining a human being” (p. 9). Indeed, it would be impossible to categorize human beings definitively, so why would we attempt to do so with art, which endeavors to embrace our most complex demonstrations of self-expression? Even in this complicated web of subjective expression, there must be some objective measures to determine what constitutes a work of art, right?
Art is a term applied to a complex network of aesthetic styles. The rules vary so much from genre to genre that it would be nearly impossible in the limited scope of this lecture to explain all of them. There is, however, one common thread. Across the centuries and numerous genres, art can always be counted upon as a unique and creative form of human expression.
Simply speaking, creativity as it applies to art is the act of generating new ways of communicating ideas. Artists apply their styles and techniques to communicate with the viewers. Originality is the key in any creative endeavor. Although the idea that the artist seeks to communicate might not necessarily be original, the way in which it is communicated should be unique in order for the final product to be considered art. So how does the creative process work? There is no singular creative process. In fact, from a psychological perspective, we really don’t know. Artists appear to use a variety of approaches, and as far as we know, creativity may not be duplicated. In other words, there may be other artists who are deemed as talented as Michelangelo (a subjective determination in and of itself), but there will never be another Michelangelo. The process of creativity may still be mysterious, yet “nonetheless, something happens in which humankind takes chaos, formlessness, vagueness, and the unknown, and crystallizes them into form, design, inventions[,] and ideas” (Sporre, 2004, p. 15).
What we do know is that creativity is an intuitive act. Artists simply follow their instincts to arrive at the finished work. Certainly, many of our most revered artists studied techniques, but without the artistic intuitioncreativitythe work is not art. Again, art must be an original expression. This leads to a great, long-raging debate over what constitutes art. Christo and Jeanne-Claude are among the vast cast of artists whose works have not always been accepted among the artistic community as art. Their ephemeral installations are no doubt beautiful, but are they art? In order to be considered so, we must evaluate what they are attempting to communicate. Their recent installation, The Gates (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site., sparked yet another debate over whether Christo and Jean Claude’s work is indeed art. Some critics view their work as architectural in nature, but they do not necessarily believe it possesses the spark of creative and original genius. Supporters find their work innovative in its attempt to assert an extraordinary perspective in an ordinary setting.
Art, at its core, is a refined form of communication we simply refer to as aesthetics. Aesthetics is the study of beauty, but this is not to say that all art is beautiful. Some art may be intentionally grotesque, but as the antithesis of beauty, we still consider such subjects as under the umbrella of aesthetics. The study of aesthetics is one of the five classical philosophical fields of inquiry. Immanuel Kant is considered one of the innovators of aesthetic study. His Critique of Judgment (1790) asserted that art is not simply a matter of the appreciation of beauty but a process of judgment as well. In other words, art may still be a subjective category of study, but the only way to judge art is in an informed
