Design Your Own Project Advanced Art

You will get to design your own project with three basic factors to consider: style, subject and medium. Two of these three factors need to be something that is a stretch for you. In other words, you are not very familiar with two of the three factors for the project proposal. You get to choose which two these will be. The other one can be something you are comfortable or familiar with for the project.

1. STYLES

Renaissance

Michelangelo Leonardo Raphael

Renaissance art is characterized by naturalism, the use of expressive gesture, linear perspective, atmospheric perspective, and chiaroscuro. In painting, figures are placed in a three-dimensional, believable space, and their posture and gesture is part of a complex formal arrangement. High Renaissance art, which flourished for about 35 years, from the early 1490s to 1527, when Rome was sacked by imperial troops, revolved around three towering figures: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564), and Raphael (1483–1520). Each of the three embodied an important aspect of the period: Leonardo was the ultimate Renaissance man, a solitary genius to whom no branch of study was foreign; Michelangelo emanated creative power, conceiving vast projects that drew for inspiration on the human body as the ultimate vehicle for emotional expression; Raphael created works that perfectly expressed the Classical spirit—harmonious, beautiful, and serene.

Mannerism

Parmigianino El Greco Arcimboldo

Mannerist artists evolved a style that is characterized by artificiality and artiness, by a thoroughly self-conscious cultivation of elegance and technical facility, and by a sophisticated indulgence in the bizarre. The figures in Mannerist works frequently have graceful but queerly elongated limbs, small heads, and stylized facial features, while their poses seem difficult or contrived. The deep, linear perspectival space of High Renaissance painting is flattened and obscured so that the figures appear as a decorative arrangement of forms in front of a flat background of indeterminate dimensions. Mannerists sought a continuous refinement of form and concept, pushing exaggeration and contrast to great limits. The results included strange and constricting spatial relationships, jarring juxtapositions of intense and unnatural colours, an emphasis on abnormalities of scale, a sometimes totally irrational mix of classical motifs and other visual references to the antique, and inventive and grotesque pictorial fantasies.

Baroque

Rembrandt Caravaggio Vermeer

Baroque artists have images that are direct, obvious, and dramatic. Artist tries to draw the viewer in to participate in the scene. Art work has depictions that feel physically and psychologically real and are emotionally intense. Artists have extravagant settings and ornamentation with dramatic use of color. They also had dramatic contrasts between light and dark, light and shadow. As opposed to Renaissance art with its clearly defined planes, with each figure placed in isolation from each other, Baroque art has continuous overlapping of figures and elements. Common themes: grandiose visions, ecstasies and conversions, martyrdom and death, intense light, intense psychological moments.

Romanticism

Turner Goya Delacroix

The romantic art movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature. . In contrast to the rational and Classicist ideal models, Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of 'heroic' individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art.

Realism

Bonheur Homer Eakins

Realism was a general trend, as well as a specific style of art. Realism heralded a general move away from the 'ideal' (as typified by the art of Classical mythology, so beloved by Renaissance artists and sculptors) towards the ordinary. Thus, in their figure drawing and figure painting, Realists portrayed real people not idealized types. From now on, artists felt increasingly free to depict real-life situations stripped of aesthetics and universal truths. In this sense, Realism reflected a progressive and highly influential shift in the significance and function of art in general, including literature as well as fine art. It influenced Impressionism and several other modern art styles, such as Pop-Art. The style retains its influence on the visual arts to this day.

Impressionism

Monet Renoir Cassatt

Impressionism is a 19th century movement that swept much of the painting and sculpture styles. Focus of this movement was on color and light. It was not just a passing fad but has defined an entirely modern way of expressing one’s artistry that eventually rubbed off on other art forms like literature and photography. It was not long before a new generation of artist using lighter brush strokes and brighter colors with lesser attention to details and more bias to landscapes and mundane, less noble aspects of life, started getting their works rejected by the established Salon. You had the works of Renoir, Sisley, Monet and Pissarro rejected year after year. These artists decided to have an independent show.

The first exhibit elicited highly critical reviews which could be expected from arts reviewers in the established traditions. Cezanne and Monet received the harshest critique by reviewer-humorist Louis Leroy whose criticism appeared in the Le Charivari newspaper and used the word “Impressionist” from Claude Monet’s painting entitled Impression Sunrise (Impression, Soleil Levant) to derisively describe the artists whose works he considered as being no more than unfinished sketches.  He scathingly wrote: Impression—I was certain of it. I was just telling myself that, since I was impressed, there had to be some impression in it ... and what freedom, what ease of workmanship! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape.

In a short time, the term "Impressionists" achieved wide public acceptance, including the artists themselves, despite the fact that the avant garde painting style had more stylistic and temperamental diversity than the word suggests.

Post-Impressionism

Van Gogh Cezanne Seurat

Post Impressionism encompasses a wide range of distinct artistic styles that all share the common motivation of responding to the opticality of the Impressionist movement. The stylistic variations assembled under the general banner of Post-Impressionism range from scientifically oriented Neo-Impressionism. Of Georges Seurat to the Symbolism of Paul Gauguin but all concentrated on the subjective vision of the artist. The movement ushered in an era during which the painting transcended its traditional role as a window onto the world and instead it became a window into the artist’s mind and soul. Despite the various individualized styles, most Post-Impressionist focused on abstract form and pattern in the application of paint to the surface of the canvas. Their early leanings toward abstraction paved the way for the radical modernist exploration of abstraction that took place in the early twentieth century.

Fauvism

Matisse Derain Vlaminck

Fauvism is the style of les Fauves (French for "the wild beasts"), a loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism.  Their spontaneous, often subjective response to nature was expressed in bold, undisguised brushstrokes and high-keyed, vibrant colors.

Expressionism

Marc Munter Macke

Expressionism emerged simultaneously in various cities across Germany as a response to a widespread anxiety about humanity’s increasingly discordant relationship with the world and accompanying lost feelings of authenticity and spirituality. In part a reaction against Impressionism and academic art, Expressionism was inspired most heavily by the Symbolist currents in late nineteenth-century art. Vincent Van Gigh, Evard Munch and James Ensor proved particularly influential to the Expressionist, encouraging distortion of form and the deployment of strong colors to convey a variety of anxieties and yearnings. Art was now meant to come forth from within the artist, rather than from a depiction of the external visual world, and the standard for assessing the quality of a work of art became the character of the artist's feelings rather than an analysis of the composition. Expressionist artists often employed swirling, swaying, and exaggeratedly executed brushstrokes in the depiction of their subjects. These techniques were meant to convey the turgid emotional state of the artist reacting to the anxieties of the modern world. Through their confrontation with the urban world of the early twentieth century, Expressionist artists developed a powerful mode of social criticism in their serpentine figural renderings and bold colors. Their representations of the modern city included alienated individuals - a psychological by-product of recent urbanization .

Abstract

Kandinsky O’Keeffe Davis

 Abstract art can be a painting or sculpture (including assemblage) that does not depict a person, place or thing in the natural world -- even in an extremely distorted or exaggerated way. Therefore, the subject of the work is based on what you see: color, shapes, brushstrokes, size, scale and, in some cases, the process (see action painting). Abstract art began in 1911 with such works as Picture with a Circle (1911) by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky. He is considered “the father of abstract art”. Abstract imagery departs from representational accuracy, to a variable range of possible degrees, for some reason other than realism. Abstract artists select and then exaggerate or simplify the forms suggested by the world around them.

Cubism

DuChamp Picasso Braque

Cubism was begun by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882-1963) in 1907. They were greatly inspired by African sculpture, by painters Paul Cézanne (French, 1839-1906) and Georges Seurat (French, 1859-1891), and by the Fauves. Picasso and Braque initiated the movement when they followed the advice of Paul Cézanne, who in 1904 said artists should treat nature "in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone." In Cubism the subject matter is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form.

Surrealism

Kahlo Dali Magritte

Surrealism was influenced by the theories of the pioneer of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (German, 1856-1939), the images found in surrealist works are as confusing and startling as those of dreams. Surrealist works can have a realistic, though irrational style, precisely describing dreamlike fantasies, as in the works of René Magritte (Belgian, 1898-1967), Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-1988), Yves Tanguy (French, 1900-1955), and Alfred Pellan (Canadian, 1906-1988). These artists were partly inspired by Symbolism, and partly the Metaphysical Painting of Giorgio de Chirico (Italian, 1888-1978). Or, it could have a more abstract style, as in the works of Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893-1983), Max Ernst (German, 1891-1976), and André Masson (French, 1896-1987), who invented spontaneous techniques, modeled upon the psychotherapeutic procedure of "free association" as a means to eliminate conscious control in order to express the workings of the unconscious mind, such as exquisite corpse.

Abstract Expressionism

Pollock de Kooning Frankenthaler

Abstract Expressionism is a painting movement in which artists typically applied paint rapidly, and with force to their huge canvases in an effort to show feelings and emotions, painting gesturally, non-geometrically, sometimes applying paint with large brushes, sometimes dripping or even throwing it onto canvas. Their work is characterized by a strong dependence on what appears to be accident and chance, but which is actually highly planned. Some Abstract Expressionist artists were concerned with adopting a peaceful and mystical approach to a purely abstract image. Usually there was no effort to represent subject matter. Not all work was abstract, nor was all work expressive, but it was generally believed that the spontaneity of the artists' approach to their work would draw from and release the creativity of their unconscious minds. The expressive method of painting was often considered as important as the painting itself.

2. SUBJECT MATTER

Still Life an art work focusing on inanimate objects, usually indoors. Common still life subjects include food, vessels, flowers/plants, books, furniture and clothing.

Portrait an art work focusing on part or the entire person or people

Landscape an art work focusing on nature, an outdoor scene usually with a horizon line.

Abstract Imagery which departs from representational accuracy, to a variable range of possible degrees, for some reason other than realism. Abstract artists select and then exaggerate or simplify the forms suggested by the world around them. 

3. MEDIA Your choice such as, colored pencils, pastels, pen & ink, watercolors, tempera, acrylic and oils.

Project Sequence1. You will need to do a research page in your sketch book of the style/artist you chose. Describe the specific characteristics of this style/artist that you appreciate and would like to use as inspiration for this project. Think about color palette, value, texture, line, shape, form and space.

2. You will need to research the medium you chose. Think about the style you chose with respect to the elements of art, especially texture in which medium would be best for this particular project. If the medium is not one you are very familiar with, you should research various techniques. (In your discussion with me, I can show you some techniques based on your choice of medium, as well.)

3. You will need to compile some reference photos and sketches of your subject matter for possible compositions for your final piece. Once you choose from one of the possible subject matter categories you should then find specific photos for reference. Your thumbnail sketches should combine several ideas from your own personal photo or from the various photos taken off the internet. It is important, as always, to create an original and personal composition and not copy someone else’s idea.

4. Choose a surface and scale for project. Example, paintings could be on paper, chip board, canvas board or panel. Large scale, 20” x 24” Small scale, 8”x10” Your medium should be considered in this decision. For instance, colored pencil would be better suited with a smaller scale project as it is a medium that takes time to cover the surface well. Pastels would be a good medium to do a larger scale project.

5. Begin final project: sketch guidelines on final project surface, build color and texture, start underpainting if appropriate.

6. Complete rubric and writing reflection when project is finished.