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IVT105/

Reading Review Assignment for PDF #5

On Meaning (in Art), excerpts from The Critique Handbook, Kendall Buster and Paula Crawford



We have been thinking about the nature of images and how they bring meaning to an artwork but as has been evident throughout our discussions, what an image depicts is only part of the way meaning is made. The way in which that image is created, its form, has equal, if sometimes more, effect.

 

In the section titled Looking at a Painting Formally and in the last section titled Ways Formal Choices Can Become Content, Buster names categories of formal elements (in painting) and how they give rise to meaning.  

 

For each form category

  • Write a basic definition
  • Further define by inventing specific examples of how meaning might arise.
  • Combine (synthesize) like categories and comments found in both sections of the reading.

 

Example:

 

Line: The most basic mark in a 2D artwork. Meaning can be created depending on what the line is made of, how it was created, and where it is located. Lines can be thin or think, straight or curvy, big or small, fast or slow, ordered or random, and extremely visible or practically invisible. Meaning may be inferred the physical quality of the mark such as how lots of sharp stabbing lines might suggest violence, or even flowing lines express grace and beauty. As marks made by the artist (process), lines display the artistŐs attitude thru gesture.

 

 

Submit: This assignment, prefaced by this assignment page should be printed for your notebooks.