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The Element of Line. Lines Lines Lines…… . Draw a line….. Now Draw a Line with Feeling… Now Draw a Line with an Angry Feeling… Now Draw a Line with the Feeling of Frustration of Having to Draw Lines in Art History Class…
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Lines Lines Lines……. Draw a line….. Now Draw a Line with Feeling… Now Draw a Line with an Angry Feeling… Now Draw a Line with the Feeling of Frustration of Having to Draw Lines in Art History Class… Now Draw a Line with the Feeling of Surrender, Relaxation and even Fun What is the definition of line? Write it down.
So, let’s look at Cezanne for a minute… Although a still-life, the artist has put together a complex arrangement of elements of visual art that create a space that is not static, but dynamic – not “still” but rather energized and “engages the imagination of the viewer.” Cezanne, The Basket of Apples, 1895 “…energizing the line into an image of becoming.”
Varieties of Line • An incredibly important element of art, a line: • Can be straight, curved, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, circular or oval, or free-form/organic. • Can “seem to possess direction – they can rise or fall, head off to the left or to the right, disappear in the distance…divide one thing from another, or they can connect things together.” • Can be “thick or thin, long or short, smooth or agitated.”
What do these artworks have to do with the element of line?? • “…Andy Goldsworthy continually experiments with the varieties of line in sculptural works that are constructed entirely out of natural materials. …these sculptures explore different qualities of line and the different qualities of the materials with which he is working.” • A line of flowers on a rock follow the fractures within the rock and contrast against its rough, dark gray stone and perhaps cause the viewer to remember spring • The icicles surround the trunk of a tree as an “‘expression of something of the cores of the tree, its spine…as if for a moment that spine has shifted and stepped outside the tree, almost as an apparition.’” • Different qualities of line = different ways of interpreting the artworks meaning.
Outline Contour Line Implied Line
Outline Lines help to indicate the edges of 2 and 3 dimensional forms. Some artists like Jaune Quick-to-See Smith actually use outlines to directly bring to light certain things they want to focus on in their work. Contour Line Contour Lines appear when an artist wants to create and shape volume in a work. For example, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and other artists who practice life-drawing don’t “draw lines in order to indicate the edges of his figure. Rather, it is as if each line surrounds and establishes a volume.”
Implied Line Have you ever stood in a cue? What’s the other word for that again?? Right! LINE Parking lots full of cars, buttons on a collared shirt, books on a shelf – all of these items placed in a row IMPLY line! “We perceive implied lines even though they neither exist in or mark the edge of our visual field. We visually ‘follow’ the line indicated by the pointing of a finger. …Movement also creates implied lines.” As seen in kinetic artworks like those of Alexander Calder, the artist relies on the viewer’s ability to “remember the path that particular elements in the work have followed. … “a sense of virtual volume as space is filled out by implied line” similar “to the lines created by a dancer in space.” Calder, Sequential View of Dots and Dashes in Motion, 1959
Compositional Strategies of Line – “One of the most powerful kinds of implied line is a function of the line of sight, the direction the figures in a given composition are looking.” • In Titian’s Assumption and Consecration of the Virgin, we see that the artist has placed his figures in such a way as to suggest a triangle which is a common compositional strategy to create unity and balance in a work and in this case “unify the worlds of the divine and the mortal.”
Qualities of Line While lines are used to create desired shapes and forms and also work to create a sense of movement and direction, they are also used to bring out intellectual, emotional and expressive qualities in artwork too! • Four Main Qualities to Focus Upon… • Expressive • Analytic or Classical • Line and Movement • Line and Cultural Convention Rembrandt, The Three Crosses, 1653
In her “Drawing Lesson” works, artist Pat Steirstudies art from past artists who used very different kinds of lines for different intellectual, emotional, or expressive effects. She called her works “a dictionary of marks”. For example, Rembrandt would bring his lines closer together OR further apart thereby creating different density effects with his linework. “Rembrandt’s line – and Steir’s too – becomes more charged emotionally as it becomes denser and darker.” In another work, she examines the “dripping line” which was a sort of signature type of line used by expressionist artists like van Gogh and other modern & contemporary painters. This type of line “indicates the presence of the artist’s brush in front of the canvas.” Furthermore, Van Gogh himself comments on the nature of his emotions and links to “the swirling turmoil of line that makes up Starry Night”: Is it not emotion, the sincerity of one’s feeling for nature, that draws us?
Steir, Drawing Lesson, Part 1, Line #5, 1978 Steir, Drawing Lesson, Part 1, Line #1, 1978
Expressive Line • “When we speak of the expressive use of a formal element, such as line, we mean that it expresses powerful emotions.” • For example, some artists like Vincent van Gogh used expressive line that was “loose and free, so much so that it seems almost out of control.” • van Gogh’s paintings tend to express his “signature” style of line just as we could say that Rembrandt had a style of line he liked to be expressive with in his works.
Analytic or Classical Line • Analytic is “precise, controlled, mathematically rigorous, logical, and rationally organized.” • Sol LeWittuses his own kind of line which is “autographic” and “recognizably his own” like van Gogh BUT his is quite different in visible influences – it is more “a product of the mind [rather than] the heart.” • LeWitt’s work definitely conveys a “sense of mathematical precision and regulality” and the use of a grid (like many artists have done in the past – including the Egyptians and Greeks! – to guide his lines, and the subjects within his works, even more precisely and creates a sense of orderliness. • Even works deemed to be more expressive like Jasper Johns’sNumbers in Colourcan use a grid to bring about order and control to an what could have been totally chaotic. As with most art, it depends on the artist’s intentions and line can be used to both liberate and control.
“LeWitt does not even draw his own lines. The works are usually generated by museum staff according to LeWitt’s instructions. …If a museum ‘owns’ a LeWitt, it does not own the actual wall drawing but only the instructions on how to make it. As a result, LeWitt’s works are temporary, but they are always resurrectable. …Since LeWittoften writes his instructions so that the staff executing the drawing must make its own decisions about the placement and arrangement of the lines, the work changes from appearance to appearance.” LeWitt, Wall Drawing No. 681 C, A wall divided vertically into four equal squares separated and bordered by black bands. Within each square, bands in one of four directions, each with colour ink washes superimposed, 1993
“Johns’s brushwork – what we call his gesture – is fluid and loose, almost as expressive as van Gogh’s, yet the grid here seems to contain and control it, to exercise some kind of authority over it.” Johns, Numbers in Colour, 1958-59
Classical Line is closely related to analytical line. The term “classical” often refers to the art of Greece from about the 5th Century BCE “but by association it has come to refer to any art that is based on logical, rational principles, and that is executed in a deliberate, precise manner.” For centuries, and even for some today, classical compositional constructions are considered the most aesthetically pleasing or beautiful and are “of the highest order”. Grids were used to construct exact proportions of the most “perfect” figures and compositions. For example, in a study for DavidsDeath of Socrates, the viewer sees the artist has used a grid to guide the proportions of the figure. Even though “the human body is constructed of parallels and perpendiculars…David has rendered it almost as if it is. …structure and control is evident”.
“Delacroix’s line is quick, imprecise, and fluid. Compared to David’s, his final painting seems a flurry of curves, knots, and linear webs. It is emotional, almost violent, while David’s is calm, in exactly the spirit of Socrates.” Delacroix, Study for The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827-28 …so, can we bring together logical line with expressive line?? OF COURSE WE CAN!!
Bringing together the Expressive WITH the Analytic… • Artists like Matthew Ritchie “often use both expressive and analytic line in the same work.” • Ritchie’s work “seeks to represent the entire universe and the structures of knowledge and belief through which we seek to understand it.” • Begins with drawings – then scans them into a computer – then reshapes, resizes, takes them apart, combines with other drawings, etc. • His work is “above all linear and charged with personal symbolism: • straight line = a wound or a direction • curved line = a linking gesture to bring things together • “‘Whenever you see an arrow or spear in a painting, it’s always much more damaging than it is constructive, whereas the looping sort of curved line is much more generous and inclusive.’” • -Matthew Ritchie- Ritchie, No Sign of the World, 2004
“From the bottom…violet straight lines shoot up into a field of what appear to be broken sticks and branches. Above the horizon line, across the sky, looping lines of this same violet colour appear to gather these fragments into circular fields of energy. After 9/11, in fact, Ritchie began to make paintings, in his words, ‘about figures being reassembled and rebuilt inside the people that had survived.’ It is as if we are at the dawn of creation, at the scene of some original ‘big bang.’”
“Here the soft curves of her figure, and of the butterfly, circles, flowers, and leaves, seem to conspire with the vertical drips of paint that fall softly to the bottom of the canvas like life-giving rain. As opposed to Ritchie’s work, in which straight and curved lines contrast with one another, here they seem to work together to create an image of the wholeness and unity of creation. Liu, Relic 12, 2005
Line and Movement • Of course,line also records movement! • For example, in nature and in the lives of human beings, lines are formed on the ground to record movement across the landscape (paths and roadways), water flows in a line, shooting stars leave a line as they make their way across the sky, ants burrow and leave a line in the earth to indicate where they’ve been, etc. • “The British artist Richard Long has been obsessed by lines made by walking through the world.” In his works, he records “the duration of his back-and-forth movement” and in a sense “the degree of his obsession to imprint his presence on the landscape. …for all their presence as marks upon the land, they possess an almost disturbing sense of human transience. … ‘one more layer, a mark laid upon the thousands of other layers of human and geographic history.’” • Again, our friend Andy Goldsworthy was interested in the lines or paths of nature on the landscape, and in particular was interested “in seeing his works change – even decay – over time as he is in bringing them into being.”
“Goldsworthy’s lines are a metaphor for human life, both the paths of our personal lives and the ‘timeline’ of human history. Much less analytic than Long’s marks in the landscape, much more fragile and expressive, they nevertheless share with Long’s work the sense of transience and impermanence.” Think for a moment about the kinds of marks you leave behind…what kind of line is left and does its impression leave a sense of the action/movement, energy, or emotion of the previous moment??
Line and Cultural Convention • Believe it or not, “certain cultural associations have come to be associated with the use of line.” – in particular, when depicting the human body! • Classical Line = Logic/Rational thought = male form • Expressive Line = Less Clear/More Emotional & Intuitive = Female Form • For example, a look at Greek and Roman sculptures from the past like Zeus/Poseidon or the Roman copy of Aphrodite of Knidos reveal this idea. “The severe intensity and powerful muscularity of the male god is far removed from Praxiteles’s more spontaneous and casual treatment of the female figure. …Every angle of her figure is softened and rounded, so that her body seems to echo the gentle folds of the drapery…” • Even though classical notions of mathematical proportions was used to create both sculptures, the kind of line used to create the forms and volume of each piece are different and denote different cultural conventions of what it meant to be female and male.
Zeus, or Poseidon, C. 460 BCE Roman Copy after Paxiteles, Aphrodite of Knidos, 4th Century BCE Original
“The biases of our culture are, naturally, reflected in our art, even in the most fundamental of art’s formal elements – line. These conventions have been challenged by many contemporary artists” (like Robert Mapplethorpe) who take a female subject like Lisa Lyon (a World Women’s Bodybuilding Champion) and “presents her to the viewer in terms not of Aphrodite, but of Zeus.” Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, 1982 “On guard! You are challenged to a dual sir!!” …or at least those outdated cultural conventions of line usage
