HOW TO LOOK AT ART?

This is a lecture about the ways of how to look at art systematically. It covered ‘directed looking’ as one approach in intuitive art appreciation and five categories of observation in this method.

Directed looking, a technique of how to look at art, is defined as examining an artwork directly by just looking at it, without reading about it. There are five components of directed looking, which can be applied to a given work of art for exploring its implicit meaning. These categories are physical properties, subject matter, illusionary properties, formal elements, and viewer perspective of an art work.

The first component is looking at the physical properties of the art work such as size, medium, and texture. The medium of a painting could be paint, pencil, metal, oil, photograph that is made by hand, brush, or machine. Rough, smooth, shiny, heavy, or flat texture has another meaning to find more about a piece of art as well as its dimensions.

The next component is exploring subject matter of the art work. Looking deeply at a figure, portrait, or landscape can make different sense such as darkness, fear, danger, and confusion in ‘Hospital Corridor at Saint-Remy’ by Van Gogh. These feelings can also be found in more abstract works such as a photograph - Weeds in Snow - by Harry Callahan, which express the feeling of passing life.

Looking at illusionary properties is the third step in directed looking. It means to make the viewer believe something which is impossible. For instance, the sense of distance in a flat surface to believe that something is closer or farther can be made by different techniques such as changing the size of subject or making it out of focus or blurring. Shading and highlighting techniques also can be used to make three dimensional subjects.

The next category is formal elements of the art work. The way that lines, shapes and colours are arranged to create the composition of artwork. For example, the explicit and implicit lines could take the viewer’s attention to a specific point. In the organization of an artwork, colours could be realistic or not, to give different feeling.

The last component is looking at the viewer perspective, which means the place where the artist puts others to look at the artwork. Sometimes the viewers are forced to have different positions and not face-to-face such as looking up or down, above or below.

It is important to look at the history and philosophy of art to have a better sense of directed looking. However anyone can get meaning of the art without being expert.