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10/31/2020 HUM-200 - Page 1.2.2 - How to See a Painting

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Applied Humanities

Learning to See How to See a Painting 1 Module One: Introduction to the Humanities / Page 1.2.2 How to See a Painting On this page: 0 of 6 attempted (0%) | 0 of 6 correct (0%) Objective: Identify strategies for analyzing visual art.

This is a photograph of a young girl looking at a painting. She is blonde, wears a grey hoodie, and has her back to the viewer. The painting has a red strip at the top, a larger olive green strip in the middle, and a slightly smaller splotchy orange-brown strip at the bottom. It has a light purple background.

A girl looks at a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The artwork is No. 16 by Mark Rothko. Oil on canvas, 1960. 8′ 6″ × 9′ 11.5″.

David Lindrum/Soomo Learning

Most of us are usually paying just enough attention to the world around us to not bump into things. —James Romaine, art historian

It might not seem obvious that we would need guidance about how to look at a painting. Isn’t it just a matter of pointing your eyes at the thing? Certainly you could do that. But if you talk to people who have spent a lot of time looking at paintings, enjoying paintings, and thinking about paintings professionally, they’ll tell you that you can get more out of your viewing experience by being intentional in how you examine a work.

10/31/2020 HUM-200 - Page 1.2.2 - How to See a Painting

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Like a wine connoisseur taking time to see, swirl, sniff, sip, and savor, you can rely on certain techniques and questions to get more out of a painting—or really any artistic creation. While the discussion that follows technically concerns paintings, most of it applies just as easily to evaluating artifacts from many other disciplines, such as sculpture, literature, music, theater, architecture, fashion, and so on.

Six Strategies for Analyzing Art

On this page, you will learn some basic strategies to use when studying works of visual art.

To look at a painting like a pro, you’ll want to adopt these six basic strategies:

1. Identify It 2. Describe It 3. Analyze It 4. Contextualize It 5. Interpret It 6. Evaluate It

Let’s briefly consider each of these steps and then go look at some art.

1. Identify It

Imagine you visit a museum and see a painting you love. You tell a friend about it, and she goes to the museum to find it. What kind of information would help her know whether she found the right one? That’s the kind of information you want to include in this step.

Who is the artist? Does the work have a title? Where and when was it created? What materials were used—that is, what is the medium of the work? What size is it?

Answers to questions such as these will help people understand which painting you were looking at. And they give you a head start on the fourth step (Contextualize It).

Multiple-Choice Question

Which of the following questions will help you identify a work of art?

How do you feel when you look at the painting? Why did the artist choose this subject? What is the title of this painting?

10/31/2020 HUM-200 - Page 1.2.2 - How to See a Painting

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Are there any symbols in the painting?

2. Describe It

Look closely at the work of art. (When you analyze the works on the following pages, remember to use the “Click to enlarge” link under each image so you can zoom in and examine the details.) While you shouldn’t judge a work by first impressions alone, you can give yourself permission to take note of your initial reaction to the piece. What caught your attention right away? What impressed you? What disturbed you? Here you may want to just use single words: “big,” “dramatic,” “winter,” “colorful,” “ugly,” “detailed,” “romantic,” “peaceful,” etc.

Now examine the details again, and describe the work. You can do this aloud, but writing down your description may help clarify your thoughts.

Notice what the painting depicts, including its iconography. What subjects and symbols can you identify? Does this work portray a specific person or event, such as George Washington crossing the Delaware River, or does it depict a general subject, like a landscape? Are there any symbols in the painting? By symbol, we mean an object that is represented as an idea (such as a cross, the primary symbol of the Christian religion, which symbolizes the crucifixion of Jesus Christ). Or perhaps the painting depicts nothing discernible and is an example of abstract art. In abstract art, a mere form in a particular shape and color may be a subject.

How is the subject depicted? What techniques did the artist use to render these subjects? What formal elements (line, color, value, contrast, light, shape, weight, space, scale, proportion, texture, balance, composition, movement, or rhythm) are evident to you?

Multiple-Choice Question

Describing a work of art requires careful viewing. What is the BEST way to view the artwork in this webtext?

by using the “Click to enlarge” link to view a high-quality image of the artwork by examining the artwork exactly as it appears on any webtext page by first making sure you understand the important information about the artwork by glancing at the artwork quickly and efficiently

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3. Analyze It

You’ve carefully noted what you see. Now it’s time to analyze the relationships within the work, or how elements of the work relate to each other. Nothing is in a painting by accident. What is the relationship between each element? Which elements are most prominent? What colors dominate the scene?

Does the work as a whole give you a feeling of hope? Of impending doom? Of energetic activity? Is there unity of content and form? That is, if a painting depicts something peaceful, is it painted peacefully? Or is there a tension between what is depicted and how it is depicted?

Answering questions like these gets easier with practice. We use the phrase visual literacy to refer to the ability to look at images and analyze the relationships between their elements. To get a handle on this, think for a moment about just regular old literacy. Being literate means having the ability to look at the odd little squiggles on this page, recognize them as letters and words, and ultimately see through them to (hopefully) comprehend the idea the author is putting forth. The process of visual literacy is similar, and just as you can improve your reading level, you can improve your ability to get more out of the art you view.

Multiple-Choice Question

What is visual literacy?

the ability to read and understand writing about art the ability to think critically about and interpret visual information the ability to reproduce visual information from memory the ability to look at many varieties of visual information

4. Contextualize It

A work of art is created by an artist during a specific time period and in a specific place. The details about the circumstances and the environment in which the artist created the work is the context of the artwork. Knowing the context of an artwork, or being able to contextualize an artwork, helps us know more about what the artist was thinking, reacting to, identifying with, rebelling against, or otherwise trying to say.

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What can you find out about the artist’s life that relates to this painting? What is known about the artist’s time and location? Maybe there was a revolution raging outside the artist’s studio. Or perhaps the artist was working in the capital city of a powerful nation enjoying a peak of prosperity. At what point in art history was this work created? Had techniques for creating the illusion of perspective been invented? Was blue paint widely available, or was it rare and therefore considered precious, much as gold is to us today? Why was the subject painted? For much of history, artists were hired by wealthy people to create paintings to be displayed in specific places. The undertaking was expensive and time-consuming, and subjects were chosen carefully (unlike how many of us tend to take pictures with our phones today).

Multiple-Choice Question

What is one example of the context of a work of art?

the historical details surrounding the artwork the emotional message of the artwork the beauty or ugliness of the artwork the value of the artwork in the current market

5. Interpret It

You’ve given careful consideration to what is shown. Now you’re asking questions about why the artist chose to show it. Of all the things in the world that could be painted, why this? Of all the ways this could be represented, why paint it this way? What is the artist trying to show us?

Is the image intended to depict a thing, a place, a person, or something else? Is it primarily about a relationship between things? Does it raise questions about how we look at certain things or challenge us to see things differently?

Every work of art embodies a mode of interpretation. For example, an elephant can be represented as majestic, or as just part of the scenery—as a friendly face, or as a menacing threat. The artist presents the world, visible and invisible, in a particular way. What “way of seeing” is evident in this work? If an artist merely wanted to convey the idea of “elephant,” that person could have just written the word “elephant” and been done with it. But by taking the time and expense to create a painting, the artist seeks to convey something more—something about how we look at a subject, or maybe something about how we should look at that subject.

10/31/2020 HUM-200 - Page 1.2.2 - How to See a Painting

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Multiple-Choice Question

Which of the following questions would BEST help someone interpret a work of art?

Why do you think the artist painted this painting? How much time did it take for the artist to create this painting? What are some other paintings that are similar to this one? What is the monetary value of this painting?

6. Evaluate It

One final perspective for you to try on: How does the image strike you? Do you like it? Does it disturb you? Is it powerful or memorable? Do you find this work personally transformative? Does this work encourage you to see and imagine the world in a new way? Do you find it puzzling? Your answers to these questions are a valid part of discussing the piece. The artist most likely intended for the work to have some kind of effect on you. Take a few moments to think about it, and then decide: Is the effect on you what the artist intended?

Multiple-Choice Question

When you’re evaluating an artwork, which of the following is MOST important to consider?

the medium used in the artwork art critics’ opinions about the artwork your own opinion of the artwork historical facts about the artwork

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