Category Art

Statues and Sculptures

Sculpture is art you can walk around and view from many sides. People have been making sculptures for thousands of years.

Long ago, sculptors carved many figures from stone, bone, and wood. They modelled others in metal and clay. Sculptors today still work with these materials. But they may also use wax, paper, fabric, string, or plastic. Any material you can think of has probably been used for sculpture.

Pictures Good Enough to Eat

The French artist Nicolas Poussin thought that in a painting, details were more important than colour. So did many other artists of the 1600’s. Poussin also believed that a painting should show only serious subjects. So Poussin based many of his pictures on legends and the Bible. The painting Holy Family on the Steps shows the family with a basket of apples. In the 1600’s, apples were a symbol of life. The apples may also make us think of a story from the Bible. The fruit eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is often shown in paintings as an apple.

In 1877, the French artist Paul Cezanne painted the apples and oranges. Unlike Poussin’s work, Cezanne’s work was not popular during his lifetime. Cezanne learned from the Impressionists, but he used perspective in his paintings very differently than they did. His style inspired modern artists, including Pablo Picasso of Spain.

The Tale of Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter spent most of her childhood in a tall, stone house in London. In the late 1800’s, young women called governesses taught girls from rich families at home. So Beatrix did not go to school and meet other children her age.

The Potters’ servants were Beatrix’s friends. Her nurse told her fairy tales, and her governess taught her about flowers and plants. Cox, the butler, brought her animals that she kept in her third-floor schoolroom.

Two of Beatrix’s dearest pets were mice that Cox caught in the kitchen. Beatrix named them Hunca Munca and Appley Dappley. She also kept a rabbit named Benjamin Bunny and fed him off a china plate. Her most unusual pet was probably Tiggy, a hedgehog, who drank milk from a teacup.

Beatrix loved to watch her animals. She drew lots of sketches showing Hunca Munca, Tiggy, and Benjamin Bunny in their favourite poses. For each drawing, Beatrix made up a story. She shared her stories with her governess after each day’s lessons.

Beatrix’s favourite season was summer, when the Potter family visited the Scottish countryside. There Beatrix admired fields full of plants and animals. She drew the many wildflowers and animals that she saw and painted her drawings with water-colours.

When Beatrix grew up, she remained good friends with her last governess. Beatrix visited her and wrote letters to her governess’s children. One of the earliest letters was actually a story about a rabbit called Peter. It included drawings of the rabbit and his three sisters.

A publishing house offered to print the story as a book if Beatrix would colour the pictures. So she brightened the drawings with delicate water-colours. The Tale of Peter Rabbit became a huge success. In time, children all around the world were enjoying stories and water-colours of Peter, Hunca Munca, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and a host of other animals that flowed from Beatrix Potter’s brush.

Mary Cassatt’s Impressions of Women

Why don’t we see more paintings from long ago done by women? Before the middle 1800’s, art schools did not accept women students. One of the first women to go to art school was the American painter Mary Cassatt.

When Mary was 16, in 1861, she entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, U.S.A. Many considered the academy daringly modern because it admitted women. But Mary thought its classes were boring, even though she studied there for four years.

In the mid-1800’s, most Americans considered art unimportant. Cassatt wanted people to take her paintings seriously. So in 1866, she moved to Paris.

Cassatt’s first paintings showed people in dark colours. Then she saw the work of Edgar Degas, an Impressionist. Degas’s pictures were a turning point in her life as an artist.

Cassatt started painting with light, bright colours. She used dabs of paint to create the “impression” of a scene rather than an exact copy. Like the other Impressionists, she showed only what the eye saw at a glance and how light changed the colour.

The people in Cassatt’s new paintings looked natural. Her most popular works show mothers and children. Other paintings picture women at peaceful activities like sewing and reading.

When Mary Cassatt died in 1926, Americans admired her paintings as much as Europeans did. Within two years after her death, four exhibits, or showings, of her work were put on in the U.S.A. The largest exhibit was in Philadelphia, where Cassatt first studied art.

Picture Credit : Google

Putting it in Perspective

How do artists do it? They paint their pictures on flat surfaces, but we seem to see deep into the pictures. Why? Because the artists use what is called perspective.

In real life, street lights down the road look as if they are smaller than street lights that are nearby. Artists try to get this effect in their painting using perspective. This means they paint some things small and short to show that they are supposed to be far away.

In the same picture, the artist paints everything at the front of the picture larger. These larger things make up the foreground. Everything in between the background and the foreground makes up the middle ground. Having a foreground, a middle ground, and a background gives a painting depth, or perspective.

Artists use even more tricks to give their paintings depth. Sometimes they paint the background pale and misty. This makes the background look far away. Other times, they draw the straight lines in a street or road so they meet in the background. This makes the road seem to disappear in the distance just as a real road appears to do.

Picture Credit : Google

Light and Dark

Artists perform a kind of magic using light and dark. They use them to grab your attention.

Suppose an artist wants you to notice a certain part of a painting. A good way to do this is to make that part a light colour and surround it with a dark colour. The result is called contrast.

In this picture, the painter used contrast to draw your eyes to the centre. He painted a white shawl on a man dressed mostly in black. Since white reflects a lot of light, the white shawl stands out well.

Suppose an artist wants you to notice a subject’s shape instead of his or her face and clothes. The artist might paint the person in front of a light. The result would be a dark shape against a light background. This kind of picture is called a silhouette.

In the picture, the painter placed the girl in front of the light. Her silhouette stands out against the sky. The artist used light and dark to give you a surprising view of an ordinary scene.