TERM 3 GRADE 7 Visual Literacy Contents Mood... 2 What is mood in art?... 2 Activity1: Mood... 2 Proportion... 3 What is proportion?... 3 Activity 2: Proportion... 3 Linear Perspective... 4 What is Linear Perspective?... 4 Featured Artists... 5 M. C. Escher... 5 Art as a story form... 6 Activity 3: Idun and the Apples... 6
What is mood in art? Mood Mood in art is the feeling or emotion that the art generates when someone is looking at it. When creating an art work you need to be conscious of what kind of mood you want the viewer to have so that you can plan your work accordingly. 2 Activity1: Mood Look at the two paintings below and answer the questions that follow. 1. How do picture A and picture B make you feel? (2) 2. What colours has the artist used in picture A to influence how you feel. (1) 3. Each artist used the space in opposite ways. Explain how they differ and why you think they did this? (3) 4. Picture B is very symmetrical and well-balance. Why would this be said about it? (2) 5. How does the angle of the painting affect how you feel about it? (2) Picture A
3 Picture B What is proportion? Proportion Proportion is the relationship of elements to one another and to the whole artwork in terms of their properties of quantity, size and degree of emphasis. Usually in an artwork you try to keep everything in proportion to one another. If you are drawing a still life with a table and a chair you want the chair to be smaller than the table otherwise the picture will look odd. Sometimes artists deliberately make objects in the artwork out of proportion. They do this because it creates emphasis and forces you, as the viewer, to look at that particular thing first because it is more prominent. Activity 2: Proportion Look at the picture by Salvador Dali called Elephants and answer the following questions. 1. What is the first thing you noticed in the picture and why? (2) 2. Do the elephants legs, being out of proportion to their bodies, irritate you? Give a reason for your answer. (2) 3. Why do you think Salvador Dali did this? (1)
4 Elephants by Salvador Dali What is Linear Perspective? Linear Perspective A painter works on a flat surface. The image the painter creates is not a real object, person or landscape. He creates the illusion of space. Before the Renaissance, artists did not understand how to create the illusion of space on a flat surface. Their landscape paintings looked flat, like the backdrop of a stage set. During the Renaissance, an architect named Filippo Brunelleshci made a discovery known as linear perspective. Linear perspective is a graphic system which shows artists how to create the illusion of depth and volume on a flat surface. This system enabled artists to paint figures and objects that seemed to move deeper into the work instead of just across it. They discovered that all the parallel lines converge and meet at a specific point on the horizon. This is called the vanishing point.
5 Look at the road the next time you drive through a landscape. It seems to get narrower and disappear on the horizon. An artist uses perspective in a painting to tell people how big or small things are. This is called proportion. A large building we see in the distance looks very small, although we know it is quite big. Featured Artists M. C. Escher Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in 1898, 17 June, in the Netherlands. He is one of the world s most famous graphic artists. He is most famous for his so-called impossible constructions, such as the ascending and descending stairs. But he also painted more realistic paintings and sculpted. M. C. Escher used the concept of perspective to create 3D looking pictures that seemed to be impossible.
6 Art as a story form Throughout history, paintings have been used to tell stories. Many artists painted stories from religious texts so that these stories would be available to all even those that couldn t read. Art is also a very good medium to help express the emotions that go along with the stories that they depict. Activity 3: Idun and the Apples Write a short paragraph of 50 70 words explaining what story this picture is depicting. Idun and the Apples by James Doyle Penrose