Art Appreciation - Formal Analysis of an artwork

1.6 Unity, Variety, and Balance Unity, variety, and balance are central principles that artists use to create visual impact. Unity gives a work a certain “oneness” or cohesion. This force can be so powerful that even a fragment of a work—for example, a broken piece of a ceramic pot—may have aesthetic unity. An artist may unify a work in one or more of three ways: through the arrangement of its elements, such as shape, line, and color, to create a unified composition; through its subject matter or the ideas it describes, otherwise called conceptual unity; and by drawing us in so that we become intensely aware of what the artist intends to communicate—a perception of wholeness sometimes known as gestalt.

The other two fundamental principles that affect the visual impact of a work are variety and balance. Variety is expressed in contrast and difference, which create visual interest and excitement; artists may use variety deliberately to give an artwork a sense of chaos and lack of control. Variety can be created by the use of different kinds of lines, shapes, patterns, colors, or textures, or even by intentionally distinguishing many separate brushstrokes or chisel marks.

Balance is imposed on a work when the artist achieves an appropriate combination of unity and variety. We appreciate balance by “weighing up” the organization of the visual elements in our minds, as we consider and examine an artwork; our comprehension of balance is primarily intuitive, and our intuitions are based on an instinctive ability to discern symmetries and patterns in the world around us. Artists use symmetrical balance in their works to suggest perfection and love (for example the design of buildings and gardens of the Taj Mahal, pp. 136–37), but they can also rely on asymmetry to create a different kind of balance.

TOPICS COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER:

• UNITY • VARIETY • BALANCE