Jonathan Morgan
Adjunct Professor of Art at Lone Star College & South Dakota State University, PhD candidate at IDSVA
Unit 1:
Reading an Artwork
ARTS 1301, Art Appreciation
Prof. Morgan
Elements of an Artwork
Topics to be Covered:
- Lines
- Shape/Form
- Scale & Proportion
- Color
Lines
Types of Lines
Contour
Where differing areas meet and form edges; Outlines; Topography
Communicative
Directional Lines that also suggest emotional info
Directional
Lines that guide the viewer's gaze within the artwork
Actual
Physically present, existing solid connections between one or more points
Implied
Suggested by intentional alignment of forms; Gives the impression of line
Rabbit
Roa
2010 CE | Graffiti at Hackney Road, London
Actual Lines
Wall Drawing #1077
Sol LeWitt
2003 CE | Grafitti on wall in Bethlehem, Israel
Implied Lines
Portrait de Femme
Henri Matisse
1918 CE | India ink on paper
Contour
Lines
Flower Thrower
Banksy
2007 CE | Grafitti on wall in Bethlehem, Israel
Directional Lines
The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh
1889 CE | Oil on canvas
Communicative Lines
Shape/Form
Geometric
Organic (aka Natural/Freeform)
Categories of Shape/Form
Cloud Gate
Anish Kapoor
2004 CE | Chicago, IL
Cube XIX
David Smith
1964CE | Stainless Steel
Open Form
Closed Form
Categories of Shape/Form
Discobolus of Myron
Myron
c. 450 BCE
Marble copy of Greek Bronze Original
Le Penseur (The Thinker)
Auguste Rodin
1904 CE
Bronze
Raft of the Medusa
Théodore Géricault
1819 CE | Oil on canvas
Scale & Proportion
Proportion
The relation based on size between parts or objects within a piece or composition
Vitruvian Man
Leonardo da Vinci
1490 CE
Ink & watercolor over metalpoint on paper
Figure of a King
Ife Culture
late 13th-early 15th century CE
Copper Alloy
Hieratic Proportion
Proportional relationships where emphasis conveys power & importance
Narmer Palette
Predynastic Egypt
c. 3000-2920 BCE
Siltstone/Slate
How Ancient Egyptian Artists Depicted People
Examples of Ancient Egyptian Artistic Canon
2D Method
3D Method
Rules for Body Proportion
Khafre Enthroned
Early Dynastic Egypt
c. 2570 BCE
Anorthosite gneiss
Khafre Enthroned
Early Dynastic Egypt
c. 2570 BCE
Anorthosite gneiss
Artemision Bronze
Classical Greece
c. 450 BCE
Bronze
Parthenon
Iktinos, Callicrates, & Phidias
432 BCE | Athens, Greece
Parthenon
Iktinos, Callicrates, & Phidias
432 BCE | Athens, Greece
San Lorenzo Colossal Head 1
Olmec Culture
c. 900 BCE | Basalt
Cologne Cathedral
Ernst Friedrich Zwirner & Richard Voigtel
1248-1322 CE (19th cent. CE) | Cologne, Germany
Cologne Cathedral (Inteior)
Ernst Friedrich Zwirner & Richard Voigtel
1248-1322 CE (19th cent. CE) | Cologne, Germany
Mistos (Matches)
Claes Oldenburg
1992 CE
Barcelona, Spain
Corridor Pin, Blue
Claes Oldenburg
1999 CE | New Orleans, LA
Cupid's Span
Claes Oldenburg
2002 CE | San Fransisco, CA
Tyson Fury on a Nail, Hard as Nails
Willard Wigan
Early 21st century CE | Mixed Media
Skateboarder on Artist's Eyelash Balanced on a Pin Point
Willard Wigan
Early 21st century CE | Mixed Media
Color
Electromagnetic Spectrum
Electromagnetic Spectrum & the Eye
Subtractive Color
Additive Color
Primary Colors
Subtractive Color
Additive Color
- Used when light is produced by a visible source.
- No color = Black.
- Light combines into coherent colors.
- Happens in the eye.
- Used with reflective surfaces like paint, ink, & pigments.
- No color = White.
- The surface absorbs certain colors of light.
- Happens on the surface.
- More accurate version of the older RYB model.
Primary Colors
Example of Primary Colors in Paint
Additive Color
The Mystery of Purple
Color Relationships
Monochromatic
'Venezia' #27 Revisited
Tino Zago
2011 CE
Oil on canvas
Analogous
Lost Hidnsight
Mark Messersmith
2009 CE
Oil on canvas, Mixed media
Complimentary
In the Loge
Mary Cassatt
1879 CE | Oil on canvas
Ben-Day Dots
Whaam!
Roy Lichtenstein
1963 CE | Acrylic & Oil on canvas
Le Cirque (The Circus)
Georges Seurat
1890-1891 CE
Oil on canvas
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
Georges Seurat
1884-1886 CE | Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago: Georges Seurat's Sunday on La Grande Jatte
Color Perception & Bias
Examples of Optical Illusions
Optical Illusions often employ basic elements to fool your eyes.
They sort of "hijack" your brain's natural pattern recognition abilities through clever use of lines, shapes, and color.
Which way is the top piece leaning?
Which line is longer?
Are the horizontal lines below straight and even?
Can you see the black dot? Can you look right at it?
Are any of the 'wheels' moving? Can you see it directly?
How about this one? Any movement?
Do you see anything "hidden" in this image?
Visual Studies
Topics to be Covered:
- Basic Concepts & Terms
- Comparative Analysis
- Visual Culture
- Applied Visual Studies: John Berger
Concepts & Terms
What is Visual Culture?
The study of the visual aspects of culture, including art, design, media, and everyday objects, and how they shape and are shaped by social, political, and cultural contexts.
Also digs into how images, objects, and visuality communicate meaning and influence social dynamics.
Insofar as we live in a culture whose technological advances abet the production and dissemination of such images at a hitherto unimagined level, it is necessary to focus on how they work and what they do, rather than move past them too quickly to the ideas they represent or the reality they purport to depict.
-Martin Jay
In so doing, we necessarily have to ask questions about technological mediations and extensions of visual experience.
Semiotics
The study of signs and symbols, and how they communicate meaning through visual and cultural codes.
Visual Studies Terminology
Representation
The way in which images, objects, or ideas are depicted or portrayed, often reflecting and reinforcing cultural values, ideologies, and power structures.
Gaze
The way in which the viewer's perspective is constructed and influenced by cultural, social, and power dynamics, such as the male gaze or colonial gaze.
Visual Rhetoric
The use of visual elements to persuade or influence an audience, often employed in advertising, propaganda, and political imagery.
Visual Literacy
The ability to interpret, analyze, and create visual messages.
Surveillance
Monitoring and regulation of individuals and populations through visual technologies and practices, which can reinforce racial and social hierarchies.
Visuality
The structures and power relations of looking, being seen, and vision in society.
Portrait Bust Of Cardinal Richelieu
Kehinde Wiley, 2009
Subject:
The actual visual/physical elements that make up an artwork.
Context:
The conditions of the artwork's creation.
Content:
The intangible aspects of an artwork; the meaning behind the piece.
Portrait Bust Of Cardinal Richelieu
Kehinde Wiley, 2009
Portrait Bust of Cardinal Richelieu
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
1640-41 CE
Napoleon Crossing the Alps
Jacques-Louis David
1801 CE
Bull-Leaping Fresco
Knossos, Crete
Minoan | 1450 BCE
Comparative Analysis
Descent from the Cross
(a.k.a. Deposition)
Rogier van der Weyden
Oil on panel
1435-1438 CE
Culture: Flemish
Flagellation of Christ
Piero della Francesca
Tempera and oil on panel
1455-1460 CE
Culture: Florentine
Three Avenues of Analysis
- Media
- Culture
- Philosophical Influence
Note: These are just 3 examples of ways to analyze artworks.
You may see other additional ways to approach this.
Comparative Analysis:
Media
Tempera Paint
Tempera Paint Ingredients
Oil Paint
Egg Tempera vs Oil Paint
Comparative Analysis:
Culture
Comparative Analysis:
Philosophy
Plato
Aristotle
Separates Form & Matter
Matter & Form are inseperable
Math as model for Pure Thought
Transcendental
Intuition over Logic
"Overcoming" the physical world
Grounds theories in Biology
Imminent
Logic as foundational
Discover the order of the world
Visual Culture
Liberty Leading the People
Eugène Delacroix
1830 CE | Oil on canvas
The Barricade (Memory of Civil War)
Ernest Meissonier
1850 CE
Oil on canvas
Liberty Leading the People (Romanticism)
The Barricade (Realism)
Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci
c. 1503–1505 CE
Oil on wood
2’ 6 1/4” x 1’ 9”
Mona Lisa (Prado)
Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci | c. 1503-1516
Original Mona Lisa by Leonardo
Untitled
(I shop therefore I am)
Barbara Kruger
1987 CE
Untitled
Barbara Kruger
Date unknown (late 20th-century)
Untitled
Barbara Kruger
1987 CE
You're seeing less than half the picture
The Guerrilla Girls | 1989 CE
Guerrilla Girls wearing their signature Gorilla Masks
Do Women Have to be Naked to Get into the Met. Museum?
Guerrilla Girls
1989 CE
Applied Visual Studies:
John Berger
“To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.)
Nakedness reveals itself.
To be on display is to have the surface of one's own skin, the hairs of one's own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded.
The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.”
Nudity is placed on display.
To be naked is to be without disguise.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972 CE
Sleeping Venus (a.k.a. The Dresden Venus)
Giorgione & Titian
c. 1510 CE | Oil on canvas
Venus of Urbino
Titian | 1538 CE | Oil on canvas
Examples of the "Venus Pudica" pose
Grande Odalisque
Ingres
1814 CE | Oil on canvas
Odalisque
Delcroix | 1825 CE | Oil on canvas
We are deep in the Orient – an exciting, erotically charged world of harems and hashish – and the lady is an odalisque, the concubine of a sultan, a woman kept for the purposes of male pleasure.
-Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Odalisque
Delcroix
Grande Odalisque
Ingres
Olympia
Manet | c. 1863 CE | Oil on canvas
"Olympia" Destroys Convention
Olympia
Manet
Venus of Urbino
Titian
Portrait (Futago)
Yasumasa Morimura | 1988 CE | Photography
Sleeping Venus
Venus of Urbino
Portrait (Futago)
Olympia
Grande Odalisque
Odalisque
End of
Unit 1
Composition VIII (The Cow), Theo Van Doesburg, 1917 CE
The visual artist can leave the repetition of stories, fairy-tales, etc, to poets and writers.
The only way in which visual art can be developed and deployed is by revaluing and purifying the formative means. Painterly means are: colours, forms, lines and planes
-Theo van Doesburg, Principles of Neo-Plastic Art, 1919
ARTS 1301: Unit 1 (RiAA)
By Jonathan Morgan
ARTS 1301: Unit 1 (RiAA)
ARTS 1301, Lone Star College, Prof. Morgan | Updated Spring 2025
