How to Look at and Enjoy Art
A quick guide to enhance your experience while looking at art.
Aug 30, 2009 Veronica Franklin
One of the easiest ways to enjoy art is by asking yourself, or your fellow art viewers, questions. Reading the label next to the work seldom illuminates you as well as you'd like, so dig in and analyze. Treat the trip to the art museum like a learning experience. It especially helps if you have some knowledge of history. What was going on in the artist's country at the time? War? Corruption? Hedonism? The answers are in the artwork whether the artist intended there to be or not. Bring a note/sketch book along and jot down things you want to know more about. Start by asking, why was this work created? Perhaps it teaches a moral lesson, provides a laugh, or exists as documentation of an event. Ask a museum guide or even a guard if you have a question about a piece.
When standing in the presence of a multitude of works, it is easy to stop seeing what is really before you. One can begin to feel saturated with the onslaught of artistic information, succumbing to a daze-like, limited awareness of what is around you. If you find yourself like this, slow down, close your eyes for a moment and choose one work in the room to enjoy at a time. You might only fit looking at one or two rooms into your allotted time, but it will be time spent well.
If you have trouble focusing on visual art, sketching the piece is a great way to understand a piece. Master artists intentionally place emphasis on different parts of their work. Remember, if the work was created before the invention of film or television especially, this was a form of entertainment that allowed viewing audiences to admire or investigate at leisure's length and may have been designed to reveal details slowly.
While sketching, or just looking, dissect the mechanics of the piece. Which part catches your eye first? Where is it then directed? Color is one of the key ingredients of visual art. The choice and arrangement of color can relay emotion, temperature, time of day, hierarchy, and distance. The master artist keeps all these in mind while composing the work. Does the artist allow your eye to read the whole piece, or are you continuously distracted by a certain feature, causing you to spend more time exploring it?
Line is another basic element that can work with or against color in art. Does the artist favor the use of line or the use of color? Line can imply what color describes, and vice versa. Find the strong lines in the work and you have found the skeleton. More subtle lines can fill in details like texture and form. Does the artist spell everything out for you or do they allow you to fill in these details yourself? The visual artist is like an author writing a story that is told visually.
Abstract vs. Realism (Representational)
People often resort to labeling their work with categories, the first division being abstract and realist. The two are closely related and interdependent. The definition for abstract is simplified, so, if you find yourself puzzled or bored by abstraction, look more closely at your favorite realist works. The best realist works aren't good because they are so realistic, but because they use abstraction well in the composition. This isn't always obvious to the casual observer. Consciously track the way your eye is led through the piece. Ask yourself where the focal point is. Why is your eye led there? A successful composition will entice your eye to travel around the whole piece while keeping your mind engaged. Your eye is attracted to high contrast areas while your mind is attracted to objects and ideas. The eye is a part of your brain and leads the mind through visual art. Nonrepresentational Abstract pieces are like the magnified portions of interesting compositional elements found in representational pieces, appealing to the eye.
Realist Representational pieces appeal to the mind, but without these essential abstract occurences in the composition, the mind quickly filters the meaning of the painting into simplified categories and the eye is left unsatisfied.
Conceptualism
Art concept is the most basic ingredient of art; the idea unfleshed. Artists are using art to describe their ideas. This represents a problem for some traditional thinkers who are accustomed to ideas that have fruited into worked through and polished objects. Concept is more mysterious and can be easily miscommunicated. Often, the artist is simply in search of a response from the engaged audience. Give yourself time to absorb the objects on less sophisticated levels of concsiousness before making a judgement call. Pull adjectives from the sensual experience derived from conceptual art and try not to see the artwork as mere objects. In other words, let emotion lead you rather than your eye, which is attracted to superficial elements, or mind, which is attracted to meaning and category. Emotional response takes longer than eye response and mind response and starts by quieting the mind.
Remember to Enjoy
Keep practicing looking and talking about art, but don't force your responses. Sometimes the response reveals itself days later, like a new song that lingers in your head. Visual Art is not instantaneously gratifying like the fast paced media of video, it is an experience to be savored. When you find work by an artist that you really enjoy, remember the name, find out who his/her teachers were. Find out who their teachers were, too! Return to the pieces you enjoy, preferably in person but in reproduction if necessary. A quality work will continue to reveal new pleasure each time.
Painting by Lisa Zelem
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