When looking at a piece of art what is the first thing you see or do? I often tend to make observations and questions like, this object appears to be bigger than the rest, why is that? why is it important? or notice that certain color choices make the painting feel warm and welcoming. Well by doing this we are essentially using Formal Analysis.
What is it? Formal Analysis is a method used to interpret art. In other words Formal Analysis is basically trying to figure out what the artist is trying to communicate by closely examining and questioning the physical piece of art. How do we do this? We do this by taking into account the various components of Formal Analysis and seeing how the artist uses them collectively. These components are color, line, scale, space, and mass. “The term composition is used is to describe how an artist puts together all these elements in the work of art. In formal analysis, you will ask how these elements – line, color, space and mass, scale, – contribute to the work’s overall composition and visual effect” Once we have analyzed the composition we might be able to determine the subject matter. (however most of the time we may also need to do some outside research this is called contextual analysis which comes hand in hand with formal analysis.)
Our comments are similar in the way that we both talk about the bigger picture of the artwork. We talk about what the artist was trying to say by using certain methods. One method we both talked about was the use of color. By using different colors it can make the person looking at it feel a certain way. We also talked about how context can be very important in the reason behind the artwork was made. What was going on in that country or time period could have been affecting the artist. One thing that is different in our posts is that you mentioned mass while I did not.