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Online Teacher Resources on the Language of Art
Welcome to the Online Teacher Resources on “The Language of Art”. In this Teacher Resource, you will learn about the basic components, or elements, of art and discover how artists and designers put these together to form visual compositions. This Teacher Resource is ideal for students new to art as well as adult learners, such as learners of a second language. Throughout the resource you will find examples from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ collection. You will also find exercises and projects to help you better understand the concepts and theories. These exercises can be used to prepare your students for a Museum visit or as follow-up activities. We hope this resource helps you make the most of your visit to the Museum.
The Visual Elements and Principles
Giving your students a bit of vocabulary and suggestions of what to look for in a work of art will help to engage them during their Museum visit. In addition, they will be more open to looking at works they are unfamiliar with. Learning this basic vocabulary will also help them better understand images in the media that advertise and promote products and services. We hope that learning to analyse an image will help them become more critical thinkers. Feel free to adapt this scenario to your needs and the age level of your group. Round out the examples provided by adding images from many sources, including advertising, photography, art and design.
Introduction
In order to build a house, you need materials, such as wood and nails. In order to bake a cake, you need ingredients, such as flour and eggs, and tools as well. In order to create a work of art, whether it is a painting, a sculpture or a decorative art object like a chair, you need the raw materials, such as paint, canvas, wood or stone, and tools, such as brushes or chisels. But you also need the basic ingredients or components of art: they are line, shape, value, texture, colour and space. These elements are put together in an infinite possibility of combinations in a very special, imaginative way by the artist or designer to create a harmonious and comprehensive whole. The artist does not put the elements together arbitrarily or haphazardly. He or she uses what we call visual principles to help make a coherent, unified visual statement that is expressive and completely individual. Those principles are: balance, tension, dominance, rhythm and movement, variety and economy. First, let’s take a look at the elements.
Line
Line is sometimes defined as a moving point and indeed, line records movement. Think of a pencil pushed across a sheet of paper, the trace of a crab walking across sand, a wet bicycle wheel across dry pavement. Lines have measure (long or short, fat or thin), direction (vertical, horizontal, diagonal) and type (curved or straight, broken or continuous). Lines also have different qualities: you can have a fuzzy line, a nervous line, a smooth line, an aggressive line, a hesitant line – in short, lines can have an endless number of qualities.
Lines also have different functions: They can be contour lines that describe or define a shape; they can show depth or perspective; they can show texture; crosshatched lines show shading of a subject.
Activity:
- Have your students look at the images below and have them describe some of the lines, their qualities and what they do in the composition as a whole.
- Have your students experiment with different mediums and draw different lines that suggest different qualities, for example a soft line, a hard line, a tough line, a gentle line, a nervous line, a hesitant line and so on.
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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) | Max BECKMANN (1884-1950) |
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Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino (1591-1666) | JAPAN |
Shape
Shape is an enclosed area that is defined or suggested by one of the other art elements, such as line, colour, texture or value. Shapes have an infinite variety and in art the shape can be naturalistic (sometimes referred to as realistic or objective) or imaginary (sometimes referred to as abstract or non-objective). We also talk about stylized shapes which are shapes taken from nature or reality that are altered by simplification or elaboration. In two-dimensional work, the volume, or three-dimensional aspect, of a shape can be suggested through various techniques, such as shading in a drawing. A three-dimensional artwork, such as a sculpture, that occupies a space is generally referred to as form because of its volume and mass.
You can have rectilinear shapes or shapes that are made up of straight lines. You can also have shapes that are organic (also called biomorphic) that are made up of curved lines.
Activity
- Have your students draw or paint an everyday object as realistically as possible.
- Have them take the same object and try to simplify or elaborate on it so that it becomes more stylized or abstracted.
- Have them create a composition made up of only rectilinear shapes, another made up of only organic shapes and a final one made up of a combination of both types of shapes.
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Jacques Linard (1597-1645) | RUSSIA |
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QUEBEC, SAINT-URBAIN | Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) |
Value
When we say value in the language of art, we refer to the relative lightness or darkness of one part of a work to the surrounding areas. Colours can have different values or shades and tints; lines can vary in value, for example starting off light and getting increasingly dark; textures and shapes can vary in lightness and darkness.
Activity:
- Have your students do a value scale (a series of squares) in charcoal, from the palest possible grey they can achieve by pressing lightly on the charcoal to the darkest shade by pressing firmly on the charcoal.
- Do a value scale in gouache of a colour using the pure colour and black and white. Start from the lightest tint of a colour to the darkest shade.
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Bernardo Strozzi (1581-1644) | Attributed to Hokusai (1760-1849) |
Texture
Texture is the surface quality of a material or an object. Texture activates two senses – that of touch, of course, and that of sight. Artists use texture in different ways. The materials themselves have a texture or a feel. Think of the texture of wood or the texture of marble in a sculpture, for instance. In painting, the paint medium – oil or watercolour – have characteristic texture. The surface on which the artist paints has a texture. We sometimes detect in a painting the texture of the canvas underneath the paint. Collages often use actual textures in their compositions, such as bits of cane for a cane chair or pieces of cloth actually glued to the surface of the painting. This is what we call actual texture, or real texture. Artists sometimes imitate texture. This is frequently seen in highly realistic paintings, such as still lifes or portraits, where the objects, animals, plants or people are so detailed you can almost “feel” the texture of the fur, petals, clothing and hair of the elements depicted. This type of texture is called simulated, imitated or visual texture.
Activity:
- Bring in objects with a variety of textures or ask your students to bring in some. Give them a few suggestions of how they can imitate texture using pencils, inks, charcoal or Conté. Do a series of small texture studies, showing a variety of surface qualities.
- Have your students find images of collages by Cubist artists like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. These artists use bits of real texture to enhance their compositions. Then have the students do collages using actual texture.
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Frank Gehry (born in 1929) | Cornelius Krieghoff (1815-1872) | Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto (1518-1594) |
Colour
Where there is colour, there is light. Light is the source of colour. In art, colour is one of the most appealing of all the elements and can instantly please or revolt observers. We are often attracted to certain colour combinations and repelled by others. We talk about a harmonious arrangement of colours or a discordant arrangement of colours.
Colour has properties of hue, intensity and value.
To explain hue, it is helpful to use a colour wheel. Hue refers to a colour’s position on the colour wheel. The three primary colours are red, yellow and blue, and all other colours are derived by mixing these three colours. When we mix colours, we change that colour’s hue. Thus, when we mix yellow with red, we change its hue. The secondary colours are orange, green and violet and are made by mixing two of the primaries together. The intermediate colours, or tertiary colours, are yellow-orange, red-orange, blue green, yellow-green and blue-violet. Each colour has a complement, or a colour that lies directly across it on the colour wheel. The pairs of complementary colours are yellow-violet, blue-orange and red-green.
The intensity of a colour refers to its light saturation. A colour can be bright or dull. You can change the intensity of a colour by adding white, black, grey or its complement. By adding white and black to a colour you also change its value (it gets lighter or darker). But by adding white or black, it becomes less pure, thus less strong, less intense.
The value of a colour refers to its lightness or darkness. You can have a light blue or a dark blue. You change a colour’s value by adding black, thus making it darker, or adding white, thus making it lighter.
Warm colours are the colours derived from yellow or red. Cool colours are those derived from blue. Neutral colours are the result of mixing a colour with its complement. We can also talk about contrast between two or more colours - the differences between the colours are more obvious than their similarities. You can have cool-warm contrasts, light-dark contrasts or complementary contrasts.
A colour composition that is made up of one colour and various values of that colour is called a monochromatic composition. A colour composition that is made up of three colours that follow on the colour wheel -- such as yellow, orange and red -- are called analogous compositions.
Activity:
- Have your students do some exercises in colour with paint such as gouache. Take one colour and do a value scale from the lightest to the darkest. Take a colour and add its complement to it. Do a colour wheel and derive all secondary and intermediate colours from your primary colours.
- Do a monochromatic composition.
- Do an analogous composition
- Do a complementary composition.
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Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) | Tom Thomson (1877-1917) |
Space
Space in the visual arts is sometimes referred to as an element and sometimes as the result of a combination of elements. Here, we will talk about space in two-dimensional art. Space obviously is an issue in sculpture (sculptures actually occupy a real space), but in two-dimensional art, the illusion of space is actually created by the artist.
Some artists are concerned with showing depth in their work. Perspective is the illusion of attempting to create space in painting, drawing or prints. Artists often use linear perspective, which uses converging lines to create a sense of depth. In landscape, we often notice the use of atmospheric, or aerial perspective. In this type of perspective, the elements in the foreground appear more precise than the elements in the background, which appear more blurry and less precise. Artists can also create a sense of space using overlapping or covering one element with another. The position of an element can also suggest depth. Elements at the bottom of a composition frequently appear closer to the viewer than elements that are higher in the composition. Colour can also give a sense of perspective with warm colours tending to advance in a composition and cool colours receding. In painting, we can also refer to decorative space, which suggests the deliberate flattening of the picture plane to create little or no sense of perspective. You can see this tendency in the works of modern artists like Henri Matisse and James Wilson Morrice.
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Emanuel de Witte (1617-1692) | Laurent de La Hyre (1606-1656) |
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Ozias Leduc (1864-1955) | Andrea di Bartolo (active in Siena, 1389-1428) |
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James Wilson Morrice (1865-1924) | |
The Formal Principles of Visual Composition
When artists create, they use the basic art elements of line, shape, texture, colour value (the lightness or darkness of the varying colours) and space to produce their works. The principles of art are guidelines that can be used deliberately by artists to achieve a sense of coherence in the work. Most of the time, however, artists use them intuitively by experimenting, moving elements around, elaborating on, deleting, sketching and even starting over from scratch. Finally, the composition “feels” right. The aim of all this is usually a sense of unity. We often refer to this as the form of the work. The form of the work, in this context, is the totality of the work, the arrangement of its parts related to the whole.*
The artwork, then, consists of a subject, its form, along with its content. The content of the work is the message the viewer receives from it, intellectual and emotional.
* Note: The word “form” is often loosely used to mean shape. In the context of this teacher resource, we are referring to the organization of the work.
Balance:
Balance is that feeling of equilibrium we get as observers of art when all the elements used by the artists seem to produce a sense of unity -- that if we took away any one element, the whole work would suffer.
Formal, or symmetrical, balance
- Imagine a line bisecting the work in half vertically. Are the elements placed more or less as in a mirror image when you compare one side to the next?
- Even if there are slight, minor variations, for instance in colour or tone, or placement, but the overall look is still symmetrical, you are dealing with formal balance or symmetric balance. Formal balance can be more suitable to certain types of subject matter, such as very solemn ones. It can also provide a straightforward solution to a composition that involves a lot of elements.
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FRANCE, Limoges |
Informal, or asymmetrical, balance
- If you imagine a line dividing the work in two, are the elements placed asymmetrically across this line?
- Did the artist place the elements in a more playful or less studied manner?
- Do you still feel a sense of equilibrium through the way the artist placed colours or other elements?
- If so, you are dealing with informal, or asymmetrical, balance.
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Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852-1929) |
Activity:
Have your students use basic geometric shapes to do a symmetrical, or formal, composition in collage.
Then, have them use the same geometric shapes to do an informal, or asymmetrical, composition.
Tension-
- Do you feel that the artist has deliberately placed the elements so that the viewer feels a sense of unease or tension when observing the work?
- Has the artist used contrast, juxtaposition or positioning of an element at a precarious angle in a particularly surprising way that is especially disquieting?
- If so, you are dealing with tension, a device especially suited to subject matter that is disturbing or, by contrast, amusing. It’s meant to surprise and throw you off balance.
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Valentin de Boulogne, called Valentin (1591-1632) |
Activity:
Compositions using strong diagonals frequently give a strong sense of tension in a composition. Have your students experiment with paper collage to create a design that gives a sense of drama and tension. Experiment with colour contrasts and textural contrasts as well.
Dominance
- Is there a contrast in orientation of elements, size of elements, colour or value of elements or other surprising approach that attracts your attention to a particular area of the composition?
- Does one element or item seem isolated so that it appears to stand out more than others?
- Do certain elements such as converging lines appear to be pointing toward a specific part of the work?
- Does one element occupy a major area of the design of the work?
- Is an element centrally located so that it really attracts your attention?
- A dominant element is one in which the others depend for their meaning or importance in the work. The sequence with which we observe the elements in a work and the amount of attention we pay to them is largely dependent on the way the artist organizes the work. While the artist does not neglect any part of the composition, a dominant is often present with subordinate elements completing the whole.
- Some works do not have a dominant feature. An element may be repeated continually throughout the composition to create an overall, (or all-over) effect. Some sculptures lack a dominant feature so that our eyes will be led around the three-dimensional piece.
- Dominance is sometimes referred to as emphasis, or focal point.
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Pieter Boel (1622-1674) |
Activity:
Have the students do a drawing of an everyday activity. Using the principle of dominance, have them put emphasis on one specific area of the drawing that will capture our attention at first glance.
Rhythm and Movement
- Is one element, such as a type of line, a colour, a shape, a texture or a value repeated throughout the composition?
- Does your eye move across recurrent motifs?
- Are colours, shapes, lines, textures or values alternating to create another type of rhythm?
- Is there a continuous flow where your eye is encouraged to move along a path that has no sudden changes in direction?
- Repetition can take various forms: it often occurs with variations, such as alternative patterns (light and dark, solid and void, for example); it can be progressive where a slight variation is introduced every time the element is repeated (a shape that is progressively enlarged each time it’s repeated); it can be a continuous flow, a movement similar to the movement of waves, where our eyes are prompted to follow a curved path without any interruption in movement.
- To avoid tedium and predictability in a composition, the artist will sometimes introduce an element of surprise.
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Nakamura Hochu (Japanese, Meiji era 1868-1912) |
Activity:
Have your students look for examples of visual imagery in advertising that use the principle of rhythm and movement. Have a discussion on the success or failure of the image to communicate its message
Variety
- Does the work display many lines, shapes, colours, textures or patterns?
- Is the composition mainly characterized by contrast and variation?
- Without a certain amount of repetition, a varied work can become chaotic and uncontrolled. By the same token, a certain amount of variety prevents the composition from being lifeless and dull.
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Carlo Bugatti (1856-1940) |
Economy
- Is all extraneous detail filtered out so that the composition is pared down to its essentials?
- Does the word simplicity come to mind as you observe or does the famous dictum “less is more” characterize the work?
- In the process of working on a composition and resolving certain issues that crop up in the creative process, the work may become busy and fragmentary. The artist will sometimes eliminate these distractions to restore order to the whole work.
Economy is sometimes associated with abstraction, but one does not necessarily imply the other.
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Mario Bellini (born in 1935) |
Activity:
Show the students the two chairs. Have the students vote to select the chair they prefer. Have them justify their choice and start a lively debate on the weaknesses and merits of both designs.
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