Hello everyone!
To my fellow classmates, I hope you all did fantastic on your finals!
This week I read an intriguing article from Artsy.net titled How to Train Your Eyes to See like an Artist by Ingrid Christensen.
In this article, Ingrid suggests that artists see the world differently than non-artists. Personally, I can see the validity in this assumption. Artists look at things with a more in-depth analysis of their shape, color, and potential. They then go on to say that although artists have come about this skill naturally, anyone can develop the skill through several exercises. The first step to developing the eye of an artist, is to stop labeling the items you’re observing. When you see an item you recognize, you only identify the item by it’s name. When you see an item you cannot label, that is when you begin looking at it’s descriptive and identifying factors (shape, color, texture, etc.). The next step is to search for variations of color, because yes the apple is red, but it is also yellow, green, and white with highlights and shadows. The third step is to begin squinting and noting shapes. By doing this, you can take a complex composition and abstract it into a simplified version composed only of the essential forms. The fourth step is to begin observing your negative spaces, because 9/10 times, nothing is placed where it is on accident. And finally, begin analyzing the effects of the angles and lines that can be drawn from the composition. This will help you determine where is the eye drawn to, what guides it, and where is the attention going.
Overall, I feel as this article was pretty worth the time to read it. Even as an artist, I figured that I wouldn’t learn anything I didn’t already know, and although I didn’t learn anything new, I gained a new perspective which is equally as valuable as knowledge. I feel as though many of the principles discussed in the article can be applied to the analyzation of art as much as it can be applied to the creation of art.
As always, thanks for the read!
I own none of the rights to the featured image used, it was derived from the artsy article cited in the post. https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-5-ways-train-eyes-artist