Subjects of Art and Content

Fernando Amorsolo

is well known for having romanticized Philippine landscapes.

Kinds of subject

• Landscapes, Seascapes, and Cityscapes • Still Life • Animals • Portraits • Figures • Everyday Life • History and Legend • Religion and Mythology • Dreams and Fantasies

Non-Representational

• The artistic content depends on internal form rather than pictorial representation. • They do not present descriptions, stories, or references to identifiable objects or symbols. Rather they, appeal directly to the sense primarily because of the satisfying organization of their sensuous and expressive elements. • They often depict visual elements like colors, lines, and shapes which are used by artists to transform emotions, feelings, and concepts.

female figure in nude.

- A favorite subject among painters/sculptors (figure) is the...

Landscape

- Artists have always been fascinated with their physical environment. - Favorite subject of Chinese and Japanese painters.

Everyday life

- Artists have always shown a deep concern about life around them. Many of them have recorded in paintings their observation of people going about their usual ways and performing their usual tasks.

Portraits

- As an instrument of expression, it is capable of showing a variety of moods and feelings. - is a product of a selective process, the artist highlighting certain features and de-emphasizing others.

Factor that affect an artist's choice of subject

- Medium - Time in which he lives and or the patronage he gets - Developments in Science and Technology

sarimanok

- The Maranaws have an animal form of .. as their proudest prestige symbol.

Figures

- The sculptor's chief subject has traditionally been the human body, nude or clothed. The body's form, structure and flexibility offer the artist a big challenge to depict it in a variety of ways, ranging from the idealistic as in the classical Greek sculptures to the most abstract. - The grace and ideal proportions of the human form were captured in religious sculpture by the ancient Greeks.

Animals

- They have been represented by artists from almost every age and place. - have been used as symbols in conventional religious art. • The dove stands for the Holy Spirit in representations of the Trinity • The fish and lamb are symbols of Christ • The phoenix is the symbol of Resurrection • The peacock is the symbol of Immortality through Christ

Subjective Meaning

- any personal meaning consciously or unconsciously conveyed by the artist using a private symbolism which stems from his own association of certain objects, actions or colors with past experiences.

Aesthetic function

- appreciating art for its own sake.

visual arts

- are representations of what the artist thought and felt about the world they lived in or they are representations of things the artists imagined or dream about.

Dreams and Fantasies

- are usually vague and illogical. Artists especially the surrealists have tried to depict, as well as the grotesque terrors and apprehensions that lurk in the depths of the subconscious. - the picture suggests the strange, the irrational and the absurd

Art

- asks questions and conveys meaning. It expresses ideas, uncovers truths, manifests what is beautiful, and tells stories.

History and Legend

- consists of verifiable facts and of unverifiable ones, insofar as ancient past is concerned. - are popular subjects of art. - certain information about history can be pieced from them

Iconography

- conveyance of deeper meanings through simple visualizations. It makes use of symbolism to generate narrative. - uncovers the cultural, social, and historical background of themes and subjects in the visual arts

Choice of subject

- everything under the sun is raw material for the artist - artist's choice involves some personal statement

Distortion

- it could also mean twisting, stretching or deforming the natural shape of the object, usually done to dramatize the shape of a figure or to create an emotional effect. - is when the figures have been so arranged that proportions differ noticeably from natural measurements.

Surrealism

- it is realism plus distortion. - it is a method where the artist in giving expression to what it is in the subconscious composes dreamlike scenes that show an irrational arrangement of objects.

Abstraction

- it is the process of simplifying and/or reorganizing objects and elements according to the demands of the artistic expression. - His concern is the rendering of the essence of the subject rather than the natural form itself.

Conventional Meaning

- pertains to the acknowledged interpretation of the artwork using motifs, signs, symbols, and other cyphers as bases of its meaning---established through time, - refers to the special meaning that a certain object or color has a particular culture or group of people.

Subject of art

- refers to any person, object, scene or event (main idea) described or represented in a work of art. - basically the essence of the piece, the main idea that that is represented in the artwork

Genre Paintings

- representations of rice threshers, cockfighters, candle vendors, street musicians and children at play.

Factual meaning

- the literal statement or the narrative content in the work which can be directly apprehended because the objects presented are easily recognized - basic level of meaning because it is derived from the decipherable forms

Realism

- when things are depicted in the way they would normally appear. - Some paintings seem to be photographic renderings of facts or anchored on historical facts.

Utilitarian function

-it does not only enriches man's life but it improves nature.

Cultural function

-it enables to transmit culture from one generation to another.

Social function

-through art, man learns to love and help each other.

Different levels of meaning

1. Factual Meaning 2. Conventional Meaning 3. Subjective Meaning

Representational

Arts that have subject (eg Painting, Sculpture, Graphic Arts, Literature and Theatre Arts) - Briefly, it depicts something easily recognized by most people. Refer to objects or events occurring in the real world - means descriptive, figurative and symbolized.

Religion and mythology

Most of the world's religions have used the arts to aid in worship, to instruct, to inspire feelings of devotion and to impress and convert non - believers. - commissioned craftsmen-tell the stories about Christ and the saints in pictures, usually in mosaics, murals and stained glass windows in churches.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts

The ugly and tragic in art

There is nothing that may be considered as an improper subject when it comes to art. • The grotesque, the ugly and the tragic are all legitimate subjects as the pleasurable and the beautiful are. • Many, in fact, have often deviated away from the stereotyped and beautiful subjects. • The greatest plays are invariably tragedies.

Still life

These are groups of inanimate objects arranged in an indoor setting. The arrangement is like that to show particular human interests and activities.

physical beauty

To Greeks, it was the symbol of moral and spiritual perfection; thus they portrayed their gods and goddesses as possessing perfect human shapes.

carabao

has been a favorite subject of Filipino artists.

Content

is the meaning or message of an art.