Semester 2 Exam 2023

Question 1

List all 9 art elements.

Answer 1

Line
Shape
Tone
Texture
Colour
Form
Sound
Light
Time

Question 2

List all 13 art principles.

Answer 2

Balance
Contrast
Emphasis/Focal point
Repetition/Pattern
Movement
Scale
Unity
Variety
Space
Rhythm
Proportion

Question 3

How should you write about an art element or principle?

Answer 3

• Where is it
• How has it been applied
• Effect on mood/message/meaning
• Use descriptors
• Include visual evidence
• Reference associated element/principle if appropriate

Question 4

Describe the 4 steps of the creative practice.

Answer 4

1. Research and Exploration:
   - Ideas based on experiences, observations, and personal interest
   - Materals, techniques, and processes → to respond to influences and ideas
   - Personal, cultural, historical, and social influences
   - Analyse and interpret influences, ideas, beliefs/values in artworks using the Interpretive Lenses, and how artists communicate these through visual language
2. Experimentation and Development:
   - With elements, principles, materials, techniques, processes, art forms, personal ideas and responses
   - Create visual language
   - Interpret meanings of artworks in different contexts with the Interpretive Lenses
3. Reflection and Evaluation
   - Is the idea being communicated?
   - Evaluate artworks with Interpretive Lenses, materials techniques and processes, symbolism, visual language
   - Use critique and feedback
4. Refinement and Resolution
   - Resolve ideas, visual language, POVs/interpretations of meanings and messages
   - refine artworks through the selection and manipulation of materials techniques and processes
   - consider the presentation and display of artworks in different contexts to communicate ideas and meanings

Question 5

Discuss Louise Bourgeois:
- nationality
- spider motif
- women
- influences and inspiration

Answer 5

Louise Bourgeois, French-American

• Spider motif: Bourgeois compares the contradictory qualities and nature of spiders with the roles of women and mothers, including her mother and herself.
• Constant representation of women, mothers, and her own experiences of these roles. She was a feminist, but her art isn’t all feminist art, and to use only that term or related terms to try to understand her work wouldn’t properly encapsulate her messages.
• Influences:
  
  • Creates art as a response to psychological stress throughout her life, especially in her childhood and in motherhood - anger and pain, self-doubt, fear/fear of abandonment, stress, severe anxiety, agoraphobia, insomnia and mania
  • Inspired by art in 1930s Paris, the subconscious, and other surrealist artists, and her role as a woman in modern society
• Art was her tool of survival, a guarantee of sanity

Question 6

Discuss Vincent Namatjira:
- nationality
- family history
- inspiration
- starting point
- messages and communication of these messages

Answer 6

Vincent Namatjira, Indigenous Australian

• Indigenous Australian with a family history of artists - his great-grandfather, Albert Namatjira, was the first Indigenous Australian to be granted full citizenship rights.
• Heavily inspired by Indigenous combatants against racism + discrimination and traditional Indigenous art.
• Started with traditional dot style paintings, now has a distinctive figurative style with which he paints politicians, historical figures, and members of his family and community.
• Paintings are a wry look at the politics of history, power, and leadership from an Indigenous POV.
  
  • Uses humour and parody to distill power dynamics and stage difficult conversations about Australian history and society
  • Challenges colonial historical narratives of Australia
  • He often positions himself in this history, helping his audiences to reconcile their complex and traumatic pasts.

Question 7

Discuss Howard Arkley:
- nationality
- messages
- subject matters
- genres of art he paints
- inspiration

Answer 7

Howard Arkley, Australian

• Arkley rejects the landscape tradition. instead celebrating the repressed ordinary and outcast, through hybridity and multiculturalism
• He addresses the reality of living in the suburbs – the inherent beauty that exists there, alongside the boredom and isolation; beauty can be found in the mundane.
• Vibrant airbrushed paintings and interest in mass culture.
• Australian abstract and figurative artist inspired by surrealism and the punk movement - disdain for conformity.

Question 8

Discuss Reko Rennie:
- nationality
- messages
- distinct elements
- where can his work be found?
- what does his work represent?
- Rennie’s hallmark and personal tag

Answer 8

Reko Rennie, Indigenous Australian

• Indigenous, started as a graffiti artist. Rennie attempts to subvert romantic ideologies of Indigenous identities
• “Fifty years on from the 1967 referendum, this country and its Government still have a long way to go in recognizing and restoring the rights of the traditional owners of this land.” - Rennie
• Distinct elements: Stylistic graffiti elements, traditional diamond-shaped designs, repetitive patterning
• His works can be found on buildings, trains, laneway walls, and as public murals or paintings.
• Represents urban Ind. experience, uneasy relationship between Ind. and non-Ind. Australia
• Icons of Rennie’s suburbia – his first bike, a mix tape, and a car. Aboriginal political mantras ‘Always was, always will be’, and ‘DEADLY’.
• Rennie’s hallmark, the radiating equal-sided diamond: a Kamilaroi design citing the dendroglyphs (carved trees) from Rennie’s traditional Country in northern NSW.
• His personal tag of a crown, a diamond and the Aboriginal flag. These symbols speak to Ind. sovereignty, but their application quotes the aesthetic of street artists.

Question 9

Discuss the 5 basic ceramic techniques.

Answer 9

• Coils
• Slabs + using slip and scoring
• Pinching (e.g. pinch pots)
• Under-glazing with sgraffito
• Slip trailing (to create designs)