Author: Joel D. Torres

Formal Analysis, What’s That About?

What is formal analysis? In your own words explain what we mean when we say formal analysis and what its components are.

Formal analysis is a way of observing the visual aspects of an art work.  What this basically means is looking at a piece of art and interpreting what the artist is conveying to the viewers through the way it was physically created.  When preforming formal analysis of art, we are looking for three main components.  These three components are, characteristics, subject matter, and the historical context of the art piece.  Some characteristics used when interpreting art are, but not limited too, color, line, scale, space, and mass.  We use these characteristics in order to take apart and dig into the physical picture of the art.  The next component, subject matter, is analyzed as a way to describe the story of the scene going on in the art work.  We look to the subject matter as yet another way of understanding the message that the artist wants to convey to the viewers, or how the scene present creates a message.  As for historical context, this component requires some research to be done around the art piece, which looks into the time period and all the things going on during the time, the history of the artist themselves, etc.  This is done to gain a better understanding for, and see the possible influences that went into creating the art work.

My Art Story

Write up your art story: What do we mean when we say art? What is art to you? How does it fit in to your life? What do you want to learn about in this class?

When we say art, more often than not our minds are flooded with the many, many pictures, paintings, sculptures, etc. that we have seen throughout the years either in school or outside of it.  When we say art what we mean is something, a piece of work using various mediums by someone and labeled upon completion as a piece of artwork. For me, art is more than just the definition and studies of art I have done in previous school years.  Art is a way of life itself that comes in a bunch of shapes and forms, created by someone who has a passion for a particular form of expression.  To me art is the visual representation from hand to the final piece and all the work in between that it takes to get from the idea to the final piece.  Art is also, to me, music-singing or performing with instruments-, dancing and even things like cooking I find to be art as well. Also nature especially, nature is a beauty and plenty of art were based off of nature.

   

Growing up art had always surrounded me from friends, to just personal interests.  Even from a young age art has always been apart of my life a pretty big part in my development as well.  For both middle and high school, I ended up in art focused studies and by the time of reaching high school even got certifications in adobe photo-shop and passed my art regents giving me my CTE certification.  Although I may not always create often my passion for art has always been present and I suspect it will never go away!  From this class I hope to learn new interesting things that I didn’t explore or learn about during high school art history!

Blog post 1: How to make a post!

With the way that the this site is organized, making a post on here may feel confusing at first glance.  But that’s what I am here to help with! Here are the steps to take in order to start making posts!

  1. First off, if not the most important step of them all, sign-up/ login to CUNY Academic Commons website.
  2. Upon completion go and become apart of the course group you are trying to make the post in, this case being “Fall 2018 Art 1010 at Brooklyn College.” This can be found by searching for the “sites” option, clicking on it and searching the class course that you are trying to join as previously stated.
  3. After that on the top left of your screen you should see a toolbar with various options to click on, the one to look for is the button that says “New.”
  4. After pressing new there it should bring you the page showing the template for making a post.
  5. Type in a heading for the post you will be publishing onto the group.
  6. Fill in the body of part of the template with the information that you’re going to talk about in said post.  Don’t forget to utilize the various tools to organize your writing however you see fit, or is required of you.
  7. Select the category, meaning the class course that you will be uploading the post too, check off all boxes necessary.
  8. check for any spelling and grammatical errors and once you are ready to post, put in any pictures and make sure to add in any necessary tags for the post and then hit the blue “publish” button.

Hope this post helped!