Art Flashcards
Readymade
Every day object presented as a work of art. Marcel Duchamp - Fountain, Bottlerack
Medium
Material on or from which an artist chooses to make a work of art.
Picture reproduced on paper, often in multiple copies
Watercolor
Transparent paint made from pigment and a binder dissolved in water.
Medieval
Relating to the Middle Ages; roughly between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance
Renaissance
Period of cultural and artistic change in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.
Calligraphy
Art of emotive or carefully descriptive hand lettering or handwriting.
Ceramic
Fire-hardened clay, often painted, and normally sealed with shiny protective coating.
Patron
Organization or individual who sponsorts the creation of works of art.
Manuscripts
Handwritten texts
Guilds
Medieval associations of artists, craftsmen, or tradesmen
Academies
Institutions training artists in both the theory of art and practical techniques.
Provenance
Record of all known previous owners and locations of a work or art.
Mural
Painting executed directly on to a wall.
Neutral Tones
Colors (such as blacks, whites, grays, and dull gray-brown) made by mixing complementary hues.
Oil Paint
Paint made of pigment suspended in oil.
Ivory
Hard, creamy-colored material from the tusks of such mammals as elephants.
Elements
Basic vocabulary of art - line, form, shape, volume, mass, color, texture, space, time and motion, and value (lightness/darkness)
Principles
“Grammar” applied to the elements of art - contrast, balance, unity, variety, rhythm, emphasis, pattern, scale, proportion, and focal point.
Two-dimensional
Having heights and width.
Line
Mark, or implied mark, between two endpoints.
Shape
Two-dimensional area the boundaries of which are defined by lines or suggested by changes in color or value.
Contrast
Drastic difference between such elements as color or value (lightness/darkness)
Outline
Outermost line of which an object or figure, by which it is defined or bounded.
Plane
Flat surface
Facade
Any side of a building, usually the front or entrance.
Conceptual Art
Work in which the ideas are often as important as how it is made.
Automatic
Suppressing conscious control to access subconscious sources of creativity and truth.
Style
Characteristic way in which an artist or group of artists uses visual language to give a work an identifiable for of visual expression.
Actual Line
Continuous uninterrupted line.
Implied Line
Line not actually drawn but suggested by elements in the work.
Rhythm
Regular or ordered repetition of elements in the work.
Etching
Printmaking process that relies on acid to bite (or etch) the engraved design into the printing surface.
Background
Part of a work depicted furthest from the viewer’s space, often behind the main subject manner.
Volume
Space filled or enclosed by a three-dimensional figure or object.
Space
Distance between identifiable points or planes.
Color
Optical effect caused when reflected white light of the spectrum is divided into a separate wavelength.
Collage
Work of art assembled by gluing materials, often paper, onto a surface. From the French coller, to glue.
Pattern
Arrangement of predictably repeated elements.
Highlight
Area of lightest value in a work.
Positive Shape
Shape defined by its surrounding empty space.
Negative Space
Empty space given shape by its surround, for example the right-pointing arrow between the E and X in FedEx.
Abstract
Art imagery that departs from recognizable images from the natural world.
Woodcut
Print created from an incised piece of wood.
Figure-Ground Reversal
Reversal of the relationship between one shape (the figure) and its background (the ground), so that the figure becomes background and the ground becomes the figure.
Concentric
Identical shapes stacked inside each other sharing the same center, for example the circles of a target.
