Illustration

An illustration is a decoration, interpretation or visual explanation of a text, concept or process, designed for integration in published media, such as posters, flyers, magazines, books, teaching materials, animations, video games and films. Depending on the purpose, illustration may be expressive, stylised, realistic or highly technical. Technical and scientific illustration communicates information of a technical or scientific nature. This may include exploded views, cutaways, fly-throughs, reconstructions, instructional images, component designs, diagrams. The aim is “to generate expressive images that effectively convey certain information via the visual channel to the human observer. Technical and scientific illustration is generally designed to describe or explain subjects to a nontechnical audience, so must provide “an overall impression of what an object is or does, to enhance the viewer’s interest and understanding”. In contemporary illustration practice, 2D and 3D software is often used to create accurate representations that can be updated easily, and reused…

Drawing

Drawing is a form of visual art in which a person uses various drawing instruments to mark paper or another two-dimensional medium. Instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, various kinds of erasers, markers, styluses, various metals (such as silverpoint) and electronic drawing. A drawing instrument releases a small amount of material onto a surface, leaving a visible mark. The most common support for drawing is paper, although other materials, such as cardboard, plastic, leather, canvas, and board, may be used. Temporary drawings may be made on a blackboard or whiteboard or indeed almost anything. The medium has been a popular and fundamental means of public expression throughout human history. It is one of the simplest and most efficient means of communicating visual ideas. The wide availability of drawing instruments makes drawing one of the most common artistic activities. In addition…

Artwork

A work of art, artwork, art piece, piece of art or art object is an aesthetic physical item or artistic creation. Apart from “work of art”, which may be used of any work regarded as art in its widest sense, including works from literature and music, these terms apply principally to tangible, portable forms of visual art: This article is concerned with the terms and concept as used in and applied to the visual arts, although other fields such as aural-music and written word-literature have similar issues and philosophies. The term objet d’art is reserved to describe works of art that are not paintings, prints, drawings or large or medium-sized sculptures, or architecture (e.g. household goods, figurines, etc., some purely aesthetic, some also practical). The term oeuvre is used to describe the complete body of work completed by an artist throughout a career. An example of fine art, such as…

Visual Arts

The visual arts are art forms such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, photography, video, filmmaking, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines (performing arts, conceptual art, textile arts) involve aspects of the visual arts as well as arts of other types. Also included within the visual arts are the applied arts such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design and decorative art. Current usage of the term “visual arts” includes fine art as well as the applied, decorative arts and crafts, but this was not always the case. Before the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, the term ‘artist’ was often restricted to a person working in the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) and not the handicraft, craft, or applied art media. The distinction was emphasized by artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, who…

Light and Space

Light and Space denotes a loosely affiliated art movement related to op art, minimalism and geometric abstraction originating in Southern California in the 1960s and influenced by John McLaughlin. It was characterized by a focus on perceptual phenomena, such as light, volume and scale, and the use of materials such as glass, neon, fluorescent lights, resin and cast acrylic, often forming installations conditioned by the work’s surroundings. Whether by directing the flow of natural light, embedding artificial light within objects or architecture, or by playing with light through the use of transparent, translucent or reflective materials, Light and Space artists made the spectator’s experience of light and other sensory phenomena under specific conditions the focus of their work. They were incorporating into their work the latest technologies of the Southern California-based engineering and aerospace industries to their develop sensuous, light-filled objects. Turrell, who has spread the movement worldwide, summed up…

Keum-boo attached gold

Keum-boo (金鈇) is an ancient Korean gilding technique used to apply thin sheets of gold to silver, to make silver-gilt. Keum-boo refers to a technique that applies moderate heat to gold and silver (about 500-700F Fahrenheit) to make it permanently attached by rubbing the surface with a very clean, well-rubbed wood or animal horn. Used for cutlery, ornaments and jewelry. When using this technique, use it in the final finishing step. This is because there is room for gold and silver to melt in the middle of the production process. Gold parts can be attached when the melting temperature is lower than the manufacturing temperature. Pure precious metals such as gold and silver have a very similar atomic structure and therefore have a good potential for bonding. Heating these metals to a temperature between 260–370°C increases the movement of the atoms. When pressure is added, this causes an electron exchange…

Lowbrow

Lowbrow, or lowbrow art, describes an underground visual art movement that arose in the Los Angeles, California, area in the late 1970s. It is a populist art movement with its cultural roots in underground comix, punk music, tiki culture, and hot-rod cultures of the street. It is also often known by the name pop surrealism. Lowbrow art often has a sense of humor – sometimes the humor is gleeful, sometimes impish, and sometimes it is a sarcastic comment. Most lowbrow artworks are paintings, but there are also toys, digital art, and sculpture. Characteristics The lowbrow is reappropriating codes from popular media such as comics, advertising, graffiti, cartoon and anything that is not considered part of the world of classical “fine arts”. It is considered part of the “surrealist pop”. The lowbrow art is often humorous, sometimes joyful, sometimes mischievous, sometimes sarcastically. Most lowbrow works are paintings, but they can also…

Steampunk

Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction or science fantasy that incorporates technology and aesthetic designs inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery. Although its literary origins are sometimes associated with the cyberpunk genre, steampunk works are often set in an alternative history of the 19th century’s British Victorian era or American “Wild West”, in a future during which steam power has maintained mainstream usage, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power. However, steampunk and neo-Victorian are different in that the neo-Victorian movement does not extrapolate on technology while technology is a key aspect of steampunk. Steampunk most recognizably features anachronistic technologies or retrofuturistic inventions as people in the 19th century might have envisioned them, and is likewise rooted in the era’s perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, and art. Such technologies may include fictional machines like those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules…

Assemblage

Assemblage is an artistic form or medium usually created on a defined substrate that consists of three-dimensional elements projecting out of or from the substrate. It is similar to collage, a two-dimensional medium. It is part of the visual arts, and it typically uses found objects, but is not limited to these materials. Technique The assemblage is obtained by incorporating into a work of art not specifically artistic three-dimensional materials and “found objects”, ie everyday objects that, elevated to the state of the art, allow artists to challenge the traditional idea of art itself. Initially it takes inspiration from the collage. “Space, in the assemblage, does not exert any ‘syntax’, does not impose any ordering principle”: “no point of view” is “privileged”, since “every trait” wants to “be equally impressive”. Furthermore there are no rules for its realization: “the cluster of heterogeneous materials can proliferate at will”. Features Assemblage is…

Hard-edge painting

Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting. Hard Edge refers to a painting that is non-descriptive and does not use any compositional theory that is visible at first glance. It is often a stencil-like, flat, geometric painting form with hard edges and sharply delineated paint jobs. Hard Edge has the big color fields in common with Colourfield Painting. It is (seemingly) emotionless and rationally controlled, the artists consciously do not leave any individual brush marks on the picture surface, the colors are rather cold, As a rule, hard-edge images have little more than two or three different colors. The painting is characterized by the large-scale and sharply demarcated color application of “cold” colors in geometric or organic forms. In…

Post-painterly abstraction

Post-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto. Greenberg had perceived that there was a new movement in painting that derived from the abstract expressionism of the 1940s and 1950s but “favored openness or clarity” as opposed to the dense painterly surfaces of that painting style. The 31 artists in the exhibition included Walter Darby Bannard, Jack Bush, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Friedel Dzubas, Paul Feeley, John Ferren, Sam Francis, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Nicholas Krushenick, Alexander Liberman, Morris Louis, Arthur Fortescue McKay, Howard Mehring, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Ray Parker, David Simpson, Albert Stadler, Frank Stella, Mason Wells, Emerson Woelffer, and a number of other American and Canadian artists who…

Retro style

Retro style is a style that is imitative or consciously derivative of lifestyles, trends, or art forms from the historical past, including in music, modes, fashions, or attitudes. It may also be known as “vintage inspired”. Definition The term retro has been in use since the 1960s to describe on the one hand, new artifacts that self-consciously refer to particular modes, motifs, techniques, and materials of the past. But on the other hand, many people use the term to categorize styles that have been created in the past. Retro style refers to new things that display characteristics of the past. Unlike the historicism of the Romantic generations, it is mostly the recent past that retro seeks to recapitulate, focusing on the products, fashions and artistic styles produced since the Industrial Revolution, the successive styles of Modernity. The English word retro derives from the Latin prefix retro, meaning backwards, or in…

Concrete art

Concrete art was an art movement with a strong emphasis on geometrical abstraction. The term was first formulated by Theo van Doesburg and was then used by him in 1930 to define the difference between his vision of art and that of other abstract artists of the time. After his death in 1931, the term was further defined and popularized by Max Bill, who organized the first international exhibition in 1944 and went on to help promote the style in Latin America. The term was taken up widely after World War 2 and promoted through a number of international exhibitions and art movements. Concrete art is an art movement with a strong emphasis on abstraction The artist Theo van Doesburg, closely associated with the De Stijl art movement, coined the term “concrete art” as he in 1930 founded the group Art Concret and articulated its features in a manifesto titled…

Precisionism

Precisionism was the first indigenous modern art movement in the United States and an early American contribution to the rise of Modernism. The Precisionist style, which first emerged after World War I and was at the height of its popularity during the 1920s and early 1930s, celebrated the new American landscape of skyscrapers, bridges, and factories in a form that has also been called “Cubist-Realism.” The term “Precisionism” was first coined in the mid-1920s, possibly by Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr. Painters working in this style were also known as the “Immaculates,” which was the more commonly used term at the time. The stiffness of both art-historical labels suggests the difficulties contemporary critics had in attempting to characterize these artists. Essentially it is a kind of combination of cubism and realism; it is also known as Cubist realism. The term was coined at the beginning of the…

Cubo-Futurism

Cubo-Futurism was the main school of painting and sculpture practiced by the Russian Futurists. Cubo-Futurism was especially popular in the Russian avant-garde, both in painting and in poetry. In different periods of his creativity in the style of cubofuturism, artists Malevich, Burliuk, Goncharova, Rozanova, Popova, Udaltsova, Exter, Bogomazov, and others worked. The poetry of Futurism and the painting of Cubo-Futurism (publicly this term was voiced in 1913 by Kornei Chukovsky) is closely intertwined in history. In Russia, “Cubo-Futurism” was also one of the self-names of the poetic group “Gilea”, which contrasted it with the ego-futurism of Igor Severyanin and his followers (and later other futuristic groups such as “Mezzanine poetry” and “Centrifuge”). When Aristarkh Lentulov returned from Paris in 1913 and exhibited his works in Moscow, the Russian Futurist painters adopted the forms of Cubism and combined them with the Italian Futurists’ representation of movement. Kazimir Malevich developed the style,…

Czech Cubism

Czech Cubism (referred to more generally as Cubo-Expressionism) was an avant-garde art movement of Czech proponents of Cubism, active mostly in Prague from 1912 to 1914. Prague was perhaps the most important center for Cubism outside Paris before the start of World War One. Czech Cubists distinguish their work through the construction of sharp points, slicing planes, and crystalline shapes in their art works These angles allowed the Czech Cubists to incorporate their own trademark in the avant-garde art group of Modernism They believed that objects carried their own inner energy which could only be released by splitting the horizontal and vertical surfaces that restrain the conservative design and “ignore the needs of the human soul” It was a way to revolt from the typical art scene in the early 1900s in Europe This evolved into a new art movement, referred to generally as Cubo-Expressionism; combining the fragmentation of form…

Vaporwave

Vaporwave is a microgenre of electronic music, a visual art style, and an Internet meme that emerged in the early 2010s. It is defined by its mimetic embrace of Internet culture and its sampling of smooth jazz, elevator music, R&B, and lounge music from the 1980s and 1990s, with the tracks typically manipulated by chopped and screwed techniques and other effects. The surrounding subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades. Visually, it incorporates early Internet imagery, late 1990s web design, glitch art, anime, 3D-rendered objects, and cyberpunk tropes in its cover artwork and music videos. Originating as an ironic variant of chillwave, vaporwave was loosely derived from the experimental tendencies of the mid-2000s hypnagogic pop scene. The style was pioneered…

Renewable energy sculpture

A renewable energy sculpture is a sculpture that produces power from renewable sources, such as solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric or tidal. Renewable energy sculpture is a flow in the environmental art, combining a sculpture, which produce energy from renewable sources (solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric or tidal). Inspired by the folks at Land Art Generator Initiative who are leading the charge, renewable energy art is renewable energy manifests itself in art or as art, most of the examples found are public art pieces. Features of the current The main feature of the sculpture of renewable energy is that the artists of this trend are developing solutions that combine the aesthetics with the functional properties of energy production and saving. Practitioners in this growing field often work according to Ecodesign criteria. Renewable energy sculpture was first proposed by artists such as Patrice Stellest, Sarah Hall, Julian H. Scuff, Patrick Marold, Elena Parucheva,…

Hypermodernist art

Hypermodernism is a cultural, artistic, literary and architectural successor to modernism and postmodernism in which the form (attribute) of an object has no context distinct from its function. Attributes can include shapes, colors, ratios, and even time. Unlike postmodernism and modernism, hypermodernism exists in an era of fault-tolerant technological change and treats extraneous attributes (most conspicuously physical form) as discordant with function. While modernism and post-modernism debate the value of the “box” or absolute reference point, hypermodernism focuses on improvising attributes of the box (reference point now an extraneous value rather than correct or incorrect value) so that all of its attributes are non-extraneous; it also excises attributes that are extraneous. Hypermodernism is not a debate over truth or untruth as per modernism/postmodernism; rather it is a debate over what is and is not an extraneous attribute. Synchrony between previously-clashing objects (now attributes) and amorphous self-identity coupled with allusions to…

Metaphysical art

Metaphysical painting (Italian: pittura metafisica) or metaphysical art was a style of painting developed by the Italian artists Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. The movement began in 1910 with de Chirico, whose dreamlike works with sharp contrasts of light and shadow often had a vaguely threatening, mysterious quality, “painting that which cannot be seen”. De Chirico, his younger brother Alberto Savinio, and Carrà formally established the school and its principles in 1917. The term ” metaphysics ” was used for the first time by the philosopher Andronicus of Rhodes (1st century BC) to title those works of Aristotle that did not deal with the previous topic, physics for the very reason, and that precisely for this reason they were cataloged in the ” metaphysics “(literally” half “” tà “” physikà “), a term that if translated means” after physics “. Metaphysical art applied to the work of Giortio de…

Tachisme

Tachisme (alternative spelling: Tachism, derived from the French word tache, stain) is a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s. The term is said to have been first used with regards to the movement in 1951. It is often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism, although there are stylistic differences (American abstract expressionism tended to be more “aggressively raw” than tachisme). It was part of a larger postwar movement known as Art Informel (or Informel), which abandoned geometric abstraction in favour of a more intuitive form of expression, similar to action painting. Another name for Tachism is Abstraction lyrique (related to American Lyrical Abstraction). COBRA is also related to Tachisme, as is Japan’s Gutai group. Term often used interchangeably with art informel or Lyrical Abstraction and applied to the movement in abstract art that flourished in Europe, especially in France, in the late…

Outsider art

Outsider art is art by self-taught or naïve art makers. Typically, those labeled as outsider artists have little or no contact with the mainstream art world or art institutions. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds. The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by those on the outside of the established art scene, using as examples psychiatric hospital patients and children. Art brut is the term by which the painter Jean Dubuffet refers to the productions of people without artistic culture. He has grouped some of these productions into a collection, the Collection of Art Brut…

Nose art

Nose art is a painting or drawing on the fuselage of an aircraft near the aircraft nose. It usually serves decorative purposes. Nose art is a form of airplane graffiti that is especially common in military aviation. While begun for practical reasons of identifying friendly units, the practice evolved to express the individuality often constrained by the uniformity of the military, to evoke memories of home and peacetime life, and as a kind of psychological protection against the stresses of war and the probability of death. The appeal, in part, came from nose art not being officially approved, even when the regulations against it were not enforced. Because of its individual and unofficial nature, it is considered folk art, inseparable from work as well as representative of a group. It can also be compared to sophisticated graffiti. In both cases, the artist is often anonymous, and the art itself is…

Nouvelle tendance

Nouvelle Tendance is a nonaligned modernist art movement, emerged in the early 1960s in the former Yugoslavia, a nonaligned country. It represented a new sensibility, rejecting both Abstract Expressionism and socialist realism in an attempt to formulate an art adequate to the age of advanced mass production. the development of New Tendencies as a major international art movement in the context of social, political, and technological history. Doing so, he traces concurrent paradigm shifts: the change from Fordism (the political economy of mass production and consumption) to the information society, and the change from postwar modernism to dematerialized postmodern art practices. New Tendencies, rather than opposing the forces of technology as most artists and intellectuals of the time did, imagined the rapid advance of technology to be a springboard into a future beyond alienation and oppression. Works by New Tendencies cast the viewer as coproducer, abolishing the idea of artist…