Visual Arts

What are the visual arts?

This part of the map covers art made to be looked at, such as painting, drawing and sculpture. It starts with the building blocks painters work with, then follows a few of the movements that changed how people see.

The building blocks

Colour

Colour theory often arranges colours on a colour wheel. Colours that sit opposite each other on the wheel are complementary: red and green, blue and orange, yellow and violet. They contrast with each other more than any other pair, and placed side by side they make each other look brighter.^[2] The Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Fauves all made use of this effect.^[2]

Tone

Tone is how light or dark something is. In painting, it means the relative lightness or darkness of a colour, and a single colour can have an almost infinite number of tones.^[1] Some artists built whole paintings from tone. James McNeill Whistler used a very limited range of closely related tones of just one or two colours, and gave the results musical titles.^[1]

Light and shade

Chiaroscuro is an Italian word meaning “light-dark”. It describes the balance and pattern of light and shade in a painting or drawing. People usually point it out when an artist uses extreme contrasts.^[3]

Movements that changed how we see

Impressionism

Impressionism grew up in France from the early 1860s. Its painters worked outdoors, spontaneously and “on the spot” rather than in a studio, trying to capture the fleeting effects of sunlight with quick, broken brushstrokes.^[4] Their first group exhibition was held in Paris in 1874, with works by Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne. Critics ridiculed Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, and the insult became the movement’s name.^[4] Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot were also core members, and Édouard Manet is often associated with the movement.^[4]

Colour field painting

In the 1950s and 1960s, abstract painters such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still made paintings of large areas of more or less flat, single colour.^[5] A second generation in the 1960s, including Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam, took the approach in a more purely abstract direction.^[5]

How to look at a painting

You don’t need special knowledge to start. Try asking:

• Where is the lightest part, and where is the darkest? That’s tone and chiaroscuro at work, and it usually tells you where the artist wants you to look.
• Which colours sit next to each other? Look for complementary pairs making each other glow.
• Does it feel like a moment or a mood? Impressionists chased moments of light; colour field painters built moods from colour alone.