Art Appreciation - Formal Analysis of an artwork

1.1 Line, Shape, and the Principle of Contrast Artists use line, shape, and contrast to communicate visual ideas. These fundamentals allow artists to describe the beautiful and ugly details of our world, and express the deepest emotional experiences of the human soul. Using only the elements of line and shape within two dimensions—two- dimensional artworks have height and width, but not depth—artists can communicate nearly every interaction in mankind’s history: from the ancient lines drawn on the ground by the Nazca of Peru (1.1.1) to brutal gun crime in a digital artwork by Noma Bar (1.1.27).

Artists can use regular, irregular, actual, implied, directional, and contour lines. Shapes are two dimensional, and can be geometric or organic. Artists can also imply shapes without using a continuous boundary, for example the AT&T logo artist who used blue lines to imply a spherical shape (1.1.23). Contrast can be created using positive and negative shapes, and artists create striking examples of figure-ground reversal, such as M. C. Escher’s Sky and Water I (1.1.28).

TOPICS COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER:

• LINE • SHAPE • CONTRAST