Art Appreciation: How to See and Interpret Paintings

Designed to help you see and interprets paintings, this course is organised around two main themes: the visual and the narrative. To start with, we will look into the way a painting is made. We will consider different techniques such as egg tempera, fresco, watercolour, and oil paint. We will also consider the question of the support, from the wall to the canvas. We will turn our attention to the composition, and pay attention to the depiction of light, the use of structuring lines, the organisation of space, and the way colours are chosen and organised, as well as the use of texture. In a second set of sessions, we will focus on techniques we can use to find the meaning of a painting. We will discover what “iconography” is and how symbols work. We will come back on the importance of the historical context to understand a work of art. And we will question whether it is necessary to know the artist’s biography to understand his/her work. Finally, as we consider abstract painting, we will go back to the purely visual (scale, colour, line, texture), and wonder if, and how, it can communicate a meaning to us viewers.