Portrait Art a Art Type

A painting, drawing, or sculpture or other medium showing a person or several people. Portraits usually
Show just the face and shoulders, but it can include part or all of the body, as well.

                                         

          Portraiture is the recording of an individual's appearance and personality, whether in a photograph, a painting or sculpture, or other medium. It has often been a work incorporating two statements, one by the portrait artist about perception, style and skill and another by the portrait subject on his or her place in the world. Thus, attire, pose and facial expression have always played a central role in portraiture.

While traditional portraiture could be said to have reached its zenith at the end of the 19th century with the work of such artists as Sargeant and Zorn, it still remains a popular choice for patrons and artists alike. In the case of the former, an urge for self-documentation and immortalization leads many people to commission artistic likenesses to display and save for future generations. For the latter, the a focused study and rendering of a unique personage continues to be one of the most enigmatic and complex subjects available to them as artists.

In a parallel vein, the contemporary worldof art and fashion is seeing a resurgence of portrait art. This new portraiture has often meant an indirect approach to the genre, even a conceptual one, or has used the subject as a foil, with portraits serving, as writer and curator Pernilla Holmes has written, "to comment on larger issues, such as individual identity, social inequities, politics, celebrity obsession and the genre of portraiture itself." The diversity of expression is reflected in the media used: from paint to mixed media, from photography to video.

VISIONARY EXPRESSION a Art Type

Art that involves simplification and/or rearrangement of natural objects to meet the needs of Artistic expression.

The sad truth about descriptive categories like “visionary art” is that they are both useful and lame. Especially in the art world, the language of genres and styles often has more to do with galleries and critics than with making and enjoying art. But reflecting about categories can also be fruitful, because it shapes the context of our seeing—and more importantly, the way we share and talk about our seeing. So here is my seed crystal: visionary art is art that resonates with visionary experiences, those undeniably powerful eruptions of numinous and multidimensional perception that suggest other orders of reality. Certain individuals have a predilection for visionary experiences, but these luminous glimpses bless us all at some point in our lives—sometimes through intentionally induced trance states or psychoactive raptures, and sometimes through the gratuitous grace of deep dreams or the demented funhouse of a quasi-schizophrenic break. But we also understand and experience visionary experience through visionary culture, those artifacts of human culture with its eyes agog.

From the perspective of the mainstream art system, however, visionary art could be seen as an attempt to broaden and extend the notion of the outsider artist—those creative madmen, religious eccentrics, and poor folk considered to be outside the boundaries of conventional art history. The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, for example, describes its collection as “art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself.” That’s all fine and well, and the museum is cool, but this definition is pretty lacking. By insisting that visionary artists are self-taught, the AVAM implies that visionary art is not found inside the schools, movements, or lineages that compose the dominant flows of art history. It becomes a purely idiosyncratic affair, reduced to the solitary, obsessive individual, a Simon Rodia or a Howard Finster. But many visionary artists—by my definition—are and have been formally educated. More importantly, many visionary artists self-consciously locate their work within a lineage of inspired image-makers that stretches back through generations of Surrealist dreamers, mystic minimalists, and medieval icon painters. Abstract art, the most exalted and intellectualized gesture of the modernist avant-garde, actually emerged from a lotus pond of theosophy, spiritualism, and occult meditation practices.

The historical lineage of visionary artists masks a deeper and more commanding claim that sets the genre apart from the marvelous idiosyncrasies of outsider art. The claim is that the visionary artist gives personal expression to a trans personal dimension, a cosmic plane that uncovers the nature that lies beyond naturalism, and that reveals, not an individual imagination, but an imaginably world, a mundus imaginably is. Far from being outside, this world lies within. Henry Corbin, the brilliant twentieth century scholar of Sufism, coined the term mundus imaginalis to describe the 'alam al-mithal, the visionary realm where prophetic experience is said to literally take place. It is a realm of the imagination, but a true imagination that has a claim on reality because it mediates between the sensual world and the higher abstract realms of angelic or 

cosmic intelligence  The mundus imaginary is a place of encounter and transformation. “Is it possible to see without being in the place where one sees?” asks Corbin, throwing down the gambit of visionary experience. “Theophanic visions, mental visions, ecstatic visions in a state or dream or of waking are in themselves penetrations into the world they see.”

From the perspective of planetary culture, we might broaden Corbin’s definition to include the visionary domains that are associated with cultural traditions and holy paths throughout (and perhaps beyond) human history. The worlds visited by the shaman, the seer, the sibyl, and the prophet are all outposts of the mundus imaginary  But this imaginable world is also produced through the labor of traditional sacred artists, who have incarnated these visions in the mythic maps, sacred geometries, and iconography of tribes and cultures the world over. When contemporary visionary artists appropriate and sample aspects of these different cultural traditions, these different domains begin to appear, for all their differences, as a single space of the trans personal imagination, an immense vibrating network of sacred zones and forms. That’s how the mundus imaginaries grow truly global.

Genre Art a Art Type

Art that has a subject matter that concerns with everyday life, domestic scenes, sentimental family Relationships, etc.

Genre typically immediately followed by the word "painting” is most frequently used in art to mean "a scene of everyday life." A genre painting has a person (or people) in it doing something. Not a great big important something, either. Your basic genre painting subject is bound to be plucking a chicken, lighting a pipe, delousing a child's head or some other equally unglamorous activity.

"Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A lot of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind."

(Nicholas Sparks, "How to Learn the Craft," 2002)

"[F]ar from being merely 'stylistic' devices, genres create effects of reality and truth, authority and plausibility, which are central to the different ways the world is understood in the writing of history or of philosophy or of science, or in painting, or in everyday talk. These effects are not, however, fixed and stable, since texts--even the simplest and most formulaic--do not 'belong' to genres but are, rather, uses of them; they prefer not to 'a' genre but to a field or economy of genres, and their complexity derives from the complexity of that relation."

(John Frow, Genre. Taylor & Francis, 2006)

"Traditionally, the study of literature has been centered on analysis and interpretation in three genres--poetry, fiction, and drama; the study of creative writing has also focused on those genres; and composition has become the domain of nonfiction. We believe that this unnatural separation can be bridged by acknowledging creative nonfiction as the fourth genre. That is, we think of creative nonfiction simultaneously as a form of literature, as a goal of creative writing, and as the aesthetic impulse in composition."

(Robert L. Root, Jr., and Michael Steinberg, the Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction. Allyn and Bacon, 1999)

"Genre, as many students of the subject have observed, functions much like a code of behavior established between the author and his reader. When we agree to attend a formal dinner, we tacitly accept the assumption that we will don the appropriate attire; the host in turn feels an obligation to serve a fairly elaborate meal and to accompany it with wine rather than, say, offering pizza and beer. Similarly, when we begin to read a detective novel, we agree to a willing suspension of disbelief."

(Heather Dubrow, Genre. Taylor & Francis, 1982)

The Difference between Genre and Style

"These two terms--genre and style--are often loosely used, and perhaps they are not susceptible to any complete clarification, but for our purposes it will be useful to make at least a rudimentary distinction between them. Genre refers to things regularly done and style to a regular way of doing things. In painting, landscape is a genre and impressionism is a style. Genres are social and durable; they persist through changes of style. A style is more local, often personal, as when we speak of Shakespearean comedy as opposed to Jonsonian comedy or Monet's impressionism as opposed to Renoir's. Both genres and styles, however, manifest themselves in recurrent patterns or codes that can be constructed by analyzing a set of individual texts."

(Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. Yale University Press, 1985)

"I mean, whatever you think about the whole superhero movie genre, at least it's getting people to read the original source material."

Landscape Art a Art Type

A picture of natural outdoor scenery, such as mountains, rivers, fields, or forests.

Landscapes are works of art that feature scenes of nature: mountains, lakes, gardens, rivers, etc. They can be oil paintings, watercolors, gauche, pastels, or prints of any kind.

Derived from the Dutch word landschap, landscape can also refer to:

City-scapes - views of an urban setting

Seascapes - views of the ocean

Waters-capes - views primarily featuring fresh water (think of Monet on the Seine)

"Landscape format" refers to a picture plane that has a width which is greater than its height.

Landscape painting ranked fourth in the hierarchy of genres set up by the Academy. History painting, portraiture, and genre painting were considered more important. Still life was considered less important.

Self Portrait a Art Type

      A painting, drawing, or sculpture or other work of art showing the artist himself.










             Self-portraits have been a method of self-exploration since humans first gazed at their own reflection in a pool of water. With the invention of the mirror came an even stronger fascination to capture one's likeness. And even within the past ten years, the public's fascination with the way an artist sees him/herself has led to exhibitions like the National Self-Portrait Collection in the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.


            Self-portraits, we have found, can be carefully staged to show the audience only what the artist wishes to project, or deeply revealing, inadvertently displaying feelings of anguish and pain. Self-portraits have been used to test new techniques, make a signature mark, launch into self-study, remember the past, and as a way to release emotion. Whichever way artists choose to construct their images, they are each forced to study their own personas both physically and emotionally.

                  What do artist's find when they search the mirror? For some the self-portrait is cathartic experience, a letting go of pent-up emotions. For others, the process reveals new insights about themselves and their work. For all artists, the self-portrait is an exploration, an opportunity to see beyond the image in the mirror and begin to search into the soul.

Still Life A Art Type.

A drawing or painting of an arrangement of non moving, nonliving objects , such as fruit, flowers, or bottles.
Usually, a still life is set indoors and contains at least one man-made object, such as a bowl or vase.

Over the centuries artists have chosen the subject of still life for a variety of reasons: to reflect the status of their owner, be it humble or haughty; for their symbolic meaning which reveals a hidden story or idea; to capture the natural beauty of transient object like a flower or fruit; to demonstrate the artist's skilled painting technique; or as a controlled structure to express the abstract qualities of the visual elements.

Traditionally, still life is the drawing and painting of items such as fruit, flowers and household objects, which are usually arranged on a table top.

Willem Kalf painted still life which reflected the opulent lifestyle and status of their owner.

Chardin showed us that there is great beauty in the humble household objects that surround us.

Henri Matisse intensified our experience of fruit, flowers and exotic artifacts with his expressive use of color.

Juan Gris used still life to experiment with the way we perceive objects in space and time.

Still life as a subject has provided a platform for artists of different eras to explore their relationship with the world of objects that surround us.

As our world evolves, new products, artifacts and modern media will continue to suggest new avenues for the stylistic development and reinvention of still life as a subject in art.