The Language of Art, Part 2

Art is a language whose rules and words are innate in all human beings.  We all are born to "know it when we see it," though few of us are ever taught to develop this talent.

Our daily lives are literally bursting with art - movies, television, radio, advertising - but how many times do we slow down to actually interpret the messages being sent to us?  How many of us have the skills to ascribe meaning to the visual world that rushes at us from literally all directions simultaneously?  What kinds of messages are we missing?  And what is by-passing our conscious minds and burying themselves deep in our inner selves?

This series is an attempt to develop the basic tools to understand and manipulate art.  As we go forward, we will use these tools to analyze, decipher and respond to messages in art.  We want to become active consumers of art, rather than passive victims of it.  Our thesis is a simple and direct one:

Art is Dangerous.

In Part 1, we examined the Grammar of Art - called the Principles.  As with all languages, Grammar without Vocabulary would be rather useless, so in this article, we will expand our lexicon.

Elements are the "words" of art.  These are the pieces that are strung on the framework of Principle to create "thoughts" and "ideas".  Through the use of Composition, the Priniciples and Elements are assembled into unified Works that can come in the form of books, symphonies, films, paintings, and so on.  Thus, we will decipher, interpret and manipulate the Language of Art to find the meanings within it, no matter what medium is being used.

All art begins with empty Space and infinite Time.  We then begin placing limits on these two universal qualities with the Four Principles.  Into these limits, we further define Space and Time with the Six Elements:

• Line
• Shape
• Form
• Texture
• Value
• Color

It is important to note that art, from the very start, is a set of limits.  Creativity is not endless abundance, since that is what we start reducing in order to create.  This is why, for instance, a movie with a massive budget is not necessarily good and often forgettable, and why a movie with almost no budget can define entirely new genres and profoundly affect audiences.  There is no Creativity without limits.

The first three Elements simply define the Three Dimensions of Space.  A Line exists in only one dimension, a Shape in two, and a Form in three.  Thought of another way, a Line is a single boundary, Shape is a series of interconnected fences, and Form creates a container that places limits in all directions.

Texture is the perceived feel of a subject through its visual characteristics.  Texture is the adjective of visual cues and it comes in pairs: hard/soft, rough/smooth, cold/warm.  If we draw a box with gray boundaries, paint is dark red and speckle it lighter and darker colors, we might perceive this a a brick, which is hard, rough and (depending on other cues) perhaps warm to the touch.

When we view an image of a brick, we can't actually touch the subject, but we interpret various visual clues to tell us what the brick feels like.

This may seem obvious, but when creating an image of a brick, the artist must examine how light and color play on the surface to create what we all know is a brick.  Change the texture, and the subject might become a shipping container, or a train car, or perhaps the gaps in a gate.  It also tells us the material from which the subject is made - is it stone, or terra cotta, or Styrofoam, or pumice?  This in turn gives us visual cues about the weight of the subject.

In the image of the bricks, we use the straightness and rigidity of the Line, combined with the Color of white, red, blue, green and yellow, plus the pattern of dark rectangles spaced with gray gaps to tell us we are looking at bricks.  The visual clues tell us what we are looking at, and our personal experience fills in weight and feel.

Value is a bit harder to define, but there is a wealth of information stored within it.  In art, Value is often a function of light - the relative abundance between light and dark.  Blue is a Color, light blue and dark blue are values.  Value includes concepts like Tint and Hue.  Value is often displayed in organized form by things like a PMS Color Chart.

A trained human eye can perceive and identify about 16 million colors and 256 shades of gray (a.k.a. contrast).  While most of us rarely stop to analyze the entire range of Values on the surfaces of objects in the real world, the artist instinctively knows to look for these clues in order to encode and transmit information about Texture.  The artist also uses Value to create three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface, like a piece of paper or a canvas.  A circle is a flat Shape that only differentiates itself between the Space inside and the Space outside its Lines.  When we apply Texture and Value to it, we can create the illusion of a metal ball with light falling on it from the upper right corner of the Space.  The more layers of Value we apply, the smoother the surface appears to be.  Note also that within the Space of the ball, the use of Radial Balance (see Part 1) creates the illusion of roundness.

In the case of the ball, the light and dark areas, or Value, are manipulated to create the illusion of three dimensions.  Shades of gray from almost white to near black are arranged inside the Shape of the circle to trick our eyes into seeing Space that rises out towards the viewer, or fall away from the viewer.  We then tell ourselves that there is depth on a flat surface of only width and heighth.

If we were looking at a great landscape painting, we would see progressive bands of changing Value across the image.  The ones we interpret to be closest to us might be a bit darker, with browns and greens and grays representing rock and foliage.

Moving up (top to bottom) and into center (outer to inner), the addition of increasing shades of blue would tell us those areas are behind or further away from the others.  Together, we interpret these Values as giving depth and distance to the subjects.  The Shapes and Forms tell us what the subjects are.

The Texture tells us what the subjects feel like and how heavy or light they are.  The Lines create a perspective that draws the eyes in different directions to tell a story - as if we are reading a book.

In the ball image, the specular shine in the upper left immediately catches our eye through Emphasis, and our eyes are led down and to the right by the curving areas of light around the perimeter of the Shape until they rest on the antipodal area of relative brightness on the lower right through the use of Balance.  The smoothness of the reflected light tells us the Texture of the ball.

We also perceive Line from an implied light source that is above left and behind the ball - behind because the center of the ball is dark, no reflections - so that an imaginary line runs upper left to lower right, creating bilateral symmetry on a diagonal.  We assume the ball is hanging motionless in empty Space because there are no other objects in the frame to create dynamic relationships.

We now have a basic tool set to begin deciphering any artwork any where at any time.  These tools work regardless of what medium we are using - paper, canvas, stone, light, sound.  We must remember, however, that these are the basics.  These rules can be poked and prodded, stretched and broken in a million different ways to create works of art.  It is the skill of the artist that elevates the mundane to the sublime.

All English speakers everywhere use the same Grammar and Vocabulary, but there is a vast differene between the common expression of "C'mon let's go," and T. S. Eliot's imortal opening "Let us go then, you and I."  The mundane curse of "Get this damn spot out of my shirt," versus Lady McBeth's profound "Out, out damn spot," belie a huge gap in meaning, context and subtext.

To appreciate the full meaning in a work of art, we must first examine Composition.  In the same way that a writer uses Grammar and Vocabulary to construct a complete story, the visual artist uses Principles and Elements within the framework of Composition to do the same thing.

The final layer of our examination will be Convention.  Just as human languages are written in many different ways - left to right/top to bottom, right to left/top to bottom, top to bottom/left to right etc. - so too does visual art have dialects.  There are hundreds of cultural contexts that affect how art is read and interpreted.  Different cultures see colors with different meanings.  The relative size and hierarchy of subjects says different things to different cultures.  For our purposes, we will primarily focus on Western European conventions, but where appropriate, juxtapose them with conventions in other traditions to show how similar Composition can have wildly different interpretation.

In all cases, there are secret messages hidden in direct view.  These messages can and have been quite subversive and have even changed the course of history, but by-passed censorship because the censors didn't understand what they were looking at.  In other cases, complex scientific Truths were made simple and comprehensible by nothing more than showing the viewer how it works in plain but spectacular images.

Art Is Dangerous!

Until our next meetings, why not take a virtual spin through the wonderful Musee D'Orsay in Paris?

Practice using the Principles and Elements while perusing some of Western Civilization's greatest art.  Be sure to bookmark this site and return often for updates as we learn to read, interpret and appreciate great art in all media.

--- Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 ---