When I’m in a museum and I look at a painting I usually think very little and either say pretty, ugly, scary, etc. But there is so much more to the painting and formal analysis is a way of looking at the painting and all of its details and fully understanding it. Formal Analysis is the idea of analyzing a single work of art, especially a painting, in terms of specific visual components. The components of a formal analysis are composition, color, line, shape, contrast, texture, and technique. All of these elements help us understand what the artist is trying to convey in his or her work. Formal Analysis is using your senses, like sight and touch, its all about what you see in the details of the painting. Although, knowing the time period the art is from and historic background also helps understand what the artist is trying to express. The goal of a formal analysis is to use all of the formal elements of a painting or sculpture to fully grasp the meaning of the work.
Category: 11 AM Class
Pedagogy and Power
The banking model is a way Paulo Freire described and critiqued the education system. This model shows a student as an empty container being filled with knowledge by their educator. Freire argued that teachers don’t communicate with the students, they make “deposits” and the students are expected to receive, memorize, and repeat the information. This empowers the teachers because they have the power to instill anything they’d like into the students, but this is at the students expense because they don’t develop a creative process. I’ve experienced this all throughout elementary school and high school. The teacher taught the information and I was expected to spit back their words on tests and essays. It wasn’t completely negative, I learned all of the facts about the subject I learned about and did well on all of my tests and assignments because it was all memorization. Now that I’m in college, I have a say and in most of my classes we have discussions about the topic we are learning about. I enjoy writing creative essays and expressing my opinion.
Formal Analysis
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.)
Blog Post #4: Formal Analysis
When we say a formal analysis we mean a break down of what is really going on in the image being shown and maybe why the piece was made. What is the artist trying to convey? What story is trying to tell? Why did the artist make the decisions he or she made? The components that help us answer these questions are inside and outside of the artwork. Composition and lines are big components to helping us understand the message behind a piece of art. Where things are placed and the lines help draw our eye to what’s most important. It can also help with story telling because it helps us move from one part of the piece to another hopefully in a smooth manner. Color and light also play a big role. Colors can make us feel. If an artist uses a cooler palette we may feel cold or feel there might be some sort of hostility while using a warmer palette might bring out warmer and cozier feelings. Light can show us what the artist wants us to see and shows us what is important. The lack of light, shadows can also show us what the author might want us to think about. Why is this part in the light but why is this other part hidden in the shadows? Also the time and place the art piece was made can tell you a lot about the authors reasoning for why they decided to make their art. Maybe there was a war in their country or some sort of political dispute that spurred them on to make the artwork with a message behind it.
Blog Post 4: Formal Analysis
Formal analysis is the act of examining closely the aspects of a work of art for its message. When we say formal analysis, we mean look at the aspects of the artwork, analyze where the emphasis is, and deduce what we are supposed to learn based on historical context, subject matter, and the properties of the artwork. The components of formal analysis are the physical elements of the artwork, the subject matter, and the historical context. Examples of physical elements we analyze are line, color, composition, illusion of space, and scale. By analyzing these, we can determine what the artist wants us to focus on. If we can determine the focus, we can determine the subject matter more easily. The historical context helps with subject matter too for it gives us a background for what the artist could be thinking about when (s)he decided to make this piece of art. Once we have determined the subject matter, we can get to the message or stance point behind the artwork, which is the goal of formal analysis.
Formal analysis
Formal analysis is how we can examine and understand art to the smallest details by seeing how the artist used their techniques to create their works. Using formal analysis involves things such as the composition, lines, color, and texture. Using these characteristics many artist use them to help us paint our own picture of what the artist is conveying. We see in todays world how advertisements use formal and contextual analysis to the fullest with how they want us to decipher their message. We see to this day how the color, scale, and composition makes us perceive works of art and define it in our own way. We as well use formal analysis when it comes to performance art from the movement, gestures, and sounds that the artist uses. Formal analysis helps us break down works and brings us to our own understandings of things from the theater to sculptures and to advertisements we see everyday.
Pedagogy and Power
What is the Banking Model?
The Banking model is a term Paulo Freire uses, to explain how the education system works. In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire describes the Banking Model as students being like “empty containers” that they are “filled” by teachers and our sole purpose is to “receive, memorize, and repeat.” or “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.” like banking. In other words the teachers know everything and the students know nothing. This empowers teachers for we as students are taught to accept the information given without questioning it, taking away the chance for us to think critically.
The closest I have come to encountering this model was with a teacher who gave great amounts of information with out clarifying it. She would expect us to know everything and wouldn’t really tell us why it was important often just leaving us memorize. It sometimes made it harder to understand but it also made you put in more effort into the class.
Pedagogy and Power
The banking model, described by Friere, is a system of which the teacher “deposits” information into their predecessors. This system isn’t perfect but is implemented into everyday life in other places other than a classroom setting.
The system empowers the voice of the “teacher” position. The one who leads or provides the guidance and successfully imprints their information into those students is in the place of power because they have the ability and unchallenged credibility to make statements whether they are one hundred percent factual or not. This disempowers the students because they go on to repeat what they have gained from that person and could be told misleading information they are told to believe in.
This model is very common in my education route. Almost every teacher follow the guidelines in which society dictates they are the one who can’t be disputed through pure authority. Certainly, this method has worked when my teachers took on a creative approach to ease the loads of information conveyed through the daily work. There are clear disadvantages to this method as well. Some of which I have encountered was that the teacher wasn’t clear with the information they tried to teach and also they didn’t seem very well educated in the subject themselves. They sometimes would side track and end up costing the whole class valuable notes that were very significant on a final exam. Other times included the teacher with a lack of interest and engagement to connect with the class and thus left the class uninterested in focusing on the class; many put their focus elsewhere like playing on their phones and angering the teacher even more.
Pedagogy and Power
Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who wrote an influential book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In this book he touches on the idea of education where he states that the learning method is most likely the “Banking Model”. Freire refers to the banking model in order to criticize the way education is provided to the student. In his own words Freire says that students’s brains are like an empty container that can only be filled with knowledge from the teacher. Furthermore in the classroom only the teacher is allowed to talk and is the only person wise and knowledgeable. In the other hand, the student is not to speak nor challenge the knowledge given to him/her. This method clearly empowers the “intelligent” teacher and oppresses the student.
In my own case, I have experienced the banking model while I was in First and Second grade. I studied in Mexico my whole elementary school, but in the beginning I had the same teacher for two years. She was very mean. If any of the students had a question she would tell us to shut up, literally, and she would follow that sentence with “you are only allowed to speak when I ask you to.” She also used violence as a learning method because she would hit the students with a metallic ruler which would provoke tears on us. The only acceptable knowledge came from her and only her. It is until now that I have learned what that experience is called. However during that time the only positive thing I could get was to continue into third grade where teachers where more humane. 
Pedagogy & Power
In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paulo Freire the explains the banking model as the current system of education and the specifize the relationship between the teachers and the students. According to Freire the teacher fills the head of their students with ideas detaching from development of themselves, the problem the students have is never reach full understanding the knowledge because of the lack of context or they don’t have any reason to apply it to anything to appreciate its full value. Freire believes this turns students into better explain as “storage units” while the teachers are the depositing knowledge into, explaining the banking model title. Freire states this is a misguided system of education, where teachers are the oppressors and the students are the oppressed. This model of education greatly empowers the teacher and disempowers the student. Paulo Freire want to change how student can be taught by coming to their own conclusion when presented a problem. He wants management of both.
In my daily education I can see the effect of how a teacher can become unintentional a oppressor. It is an odd feeling when the knowledge given isn’t as rewarding when you find it on your own. Granted that there are some of the students and I have seen quite a lot of never approach the issue critically and never get pass. We can be given the tools to work on problems but if the teacher doesn’t exercise the students capacity to develop it becomes a problem. In math and science we can rationalize this knowledge to everyday life but it’s never useful if your profession doesn’t require it. There were cases when the students and the teachers are so disconnected that the majority of the class failed to grasp it because he wasn’t push for it, the lack of interest from students was also a problem. From the ages of 10 to 18 how the hell are people supposed to care, When the internet is a thing. Overall I think that as chaotic as people in american society they can figure out on their own.
Q: don’t teachers have to go to teaching school? ….. Oh no!
