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How to Interpret a Painting
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Art Appreciation: Color Choice in Klee's "Sinbad the Sailor"
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Art Appreciation: Critiquing Your Own Paintings
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Summary: Why did an artist paint a certain painting? Learn how to figure out the intent of an artist in this free art appreciation video from an art instructor.
Gretchen Kibbe is an artist and part-time faculty member at Appalachian State University. She worked as a scenic artist on the Spike Lee movie School Daze.read more
Painting and drawing is the art of using a pigmented medium to create a picture of reality filtered through the imagination, the senses, emotions, and life experience. Artists the world over have multiplied the uses of painting and drawing as a vital mode of human expression, whether recording history, retelling myth and legend, expressing religious fervor, or exploring the unknown. From early history to the present, we have records of men and women making graphic representations of their world, showing their understanding and their curiosity. In this art appreciation series, an experienced art instructor will discuss the elements, such as spacial cues and color values, which work to together to create a great painting. She discusses famous paintings such as Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" and "Mona Lisa," how the artist controls the line of sight of the spectator with shapes and color values. The background story can also play an important role in how people interpret a painting. The art instructor will help people to develop their own skills of analysis.
"There's actually a lot that goes on when we look at a picture. It's you're trying to get the feeling for what the artist had to say, you're trying to interpret it on your terms and there's a lot to ask yourself to try to figure out why the artist did what he did. You have to assume that the artist had a good reason for doing it especially in these days when you can walk into a gallery and go well it's a pile of leaves, so what. So really looking at maybe how the artist did what they did. What went into making the picture can help you get an be feel like you can approach a visual offering from an artist no matter what period of time that they are from and no matter what it is that they are talking about. So we're going to look at a couple of pictures and talk about the language of design because a lot of what goes into a picture has to do with how we respond to shape and line and color and composition."
eHow Article: How to Interpret a Painting
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