Ch. 1-3 Flashcards
A society’s images, its ideas and attitudes, customs, skills, and arts
Culture
The native physical world that surrounds us; biochemical world within our physical selves
Nature
The “what” of a work of art
Subject
Art that is abstract and nonrepresentational
Nonobjective Art
The category of subjects with which an artist works
Genre
The “how” of a work of art (general structure and overall organization)
Form
All that which is contained within a work of art (visual elements, subject matter, underlying meaning and themes)
Content
Study of the themes and symbols in visual arts (figures and images that lend works their underlying meanings)
Iconography
The components of art that include line, shape, value, color, texture, space, and time and motion
Visual Elements
The imaginary surface of a painting that separates the viewer from the image
Picture Plane
The visual strategies used by artists, along with the elements of art, for expressive purposes
Principles of Design
The materials used in creating art
Medium
The signature look of an artist’s work; the distinctive characteristics of an artist’s work and those of a culture and era
Style
A style of art characterized by a predominant emphasis on line, including outline and pronounced contour line
Linear Style
A style characterized by a loose and gestural handling of paint, including broad brushstrokes, irregular and uneven, applied rapidly to the canvas surface
Painterly Style
A style of art in which the world is represented as it is
Realistic Style
A style of art characterized by simplified or distorted rendering of an object that has the essential form or nature of that object
Abstract Style
The path made by a moving point
Line
A picture that represents a word or an idea
Pictogram
A point that has a measurable size
Dot
The length and width of a line
Measure of a line
A line that runs up and down
Vertical Line
A line that runs left and right
Horizontal Line
A line that runs cross-wise
Diagonal Line
The measure of a line, along with its other characteristics
Quality of line
The art of fine handwriting
Calligraphy
The drawing or engraving of fine parallel lines or crossed lines to represent shading
Hatching
A late nineteenth-century French school of painting that rejected the objective naturalism of impressionism and used form and color in personally expressive ways
Post-Impressionist
In a two-dimensional work of art, illusionary space that seems to recede from the picture plane into the distance; provides a sense of depth
Pictorial Space
A line that is physically present in a work of art
Actual Line
A line created by a viewer’s perceptual tendency to connect a series of points
Implied Line
A suggestion of linear direction formed by a viewer’s knowledge of relationships in a work of art; such as the relationship between the glance of a person toward an object
Psychological Line
A style of painting and sculpture of the 1940s and 1950s, in which artists expressionistically distorted abstract images with loose, gestural brushwork
Abstract Expressionism
A twentieth-century art style whose imagery is believed to stem from unconscious, irrational sources and therefore takes on fantastical forms
Surrealism
A line that marks the outer boundaries or contours of a figure or an object
Outline
A perceived line that marks the edge of a figure as it curves back into space
Contour Line
An artistic technique in which subtle gradations of value created the illusion of rounded three-dimensional forms in space
Chiaroscuro
The mass or bulk of a three-dimensional work; the amount of space it contains
Volume
The lightness or darkness of color
Value
The creation of shading in a drawing or etching through the use of intersecting sets of parallel lines
Cross-hatching
The surface character of materials as experienced by the sense of touch
Texture
The psychological tendency to perceive a broken figure as being complete or whole
Closure
The psychological tendency to perceive a series of points or a broken line as having unity
Continuity
An area within a composition that has boundaries that separate it from what surrounds it, making it distinct
Shape
An approach to art criticism that focuses mainly on the elements and design of works of art and de-emphasizes the artist and the period
Formalist Criticism
The true mass of an art object, as defined in terms of volume and weight
Actual Mass
The apparent or suggested mass of objects represented in a work of art
Implied Mass
Shapes found in geometry
Geometric Shapes
Geometric shapes formed by the intersection of straight lines
Rectilinear Shapes
Geometric shapes formed by the intersection of curving lines, or by the lines circling back to join themselves and compose closed geometric figures
Curvilinear Shapes
A twentieth-century style, developed by Picasso and Braque, which emphasizes the two-dimensionality of the canvas and its characterized by multiple views of an object and the reduction of an image to its essential lines and shapes
Cubism
Shapes derived from those of living things found in nature
Organic Shapes
Without shape; without boundaries
Amorphous
The shapes in a composition
Positive Shapes
That which remains in the composition around or beyond the positive shapes
Negative Shapes
The relationship between the shapes or figures and the other parts of the composition
Figure and ground relationship
The shifting of viewer perceptions such that what, at one moment, appears to be the figure in a composition becomes the ground, and vice versa
Figure-ground reversal
