Visual Arts Essays

The Meaning

Visual Arts have been here since the time when a human figured out that some materials leave a trace on the surface. That’s how we got our first drawings depicting mammoth hunt, early religious beliefs, and daily life. The term itself means visualizing things that surround us. Basically, the primary function of visual arts is to recreate some being or essence. It reflects reality in visual imagery and portrays existing real world properties: color, size, spatiality, the form of an object etc. Although it may seem like a representation of just the reality, it is also a medium of transferring the events in time, a plot or a detailed narrative. It reveals the spiritual structure of humankind and its psychology. Visual arts pose the real picture of life and nature, and clearly embodies the images that do not exist in reality, only emerging from our imagination. Visual arts also appear as a branch of science.

The branch includes research that provides fundamental laws of the genesis and evolution of the visual arts as a whole, and in particular the historically determined stages of development, including styles in different national contexts; the complex issues related to the clarification of the structure of specific genre of visual arts, its contents, and forms; implementation of the description, analysis, interpretation, attribution of works of art, consideration of the characteristics of their social functioning; studying the achievements of individual national art schools, creative arts practice associations, groups, individual artists.

When developing a particular perspective, visual arts are based on the achievements of museology, restoration, and other ancillary disciplines, also taking into account the experience of related social sciences.

The Contents

Visual arts connect a wide range of genres and artists. The first one is drawing. Dating back to Paleolithic times, it was the first sign of art made by humans. It evolved to be a fully functioning art today, including professional drawings with ink, pencils, crayons, charcoals and so on. Painting is the derivative of basic drawing, taking this art one step ahead, adding complexity and more colors, evolving more and resulting in almost photorealistic paintings by talented artists. Plastic arts, particularly sculpture, is another major genre of visual arts. It is a 3D artwork that includes the use of materials which can be molded, ranging from clay to metal and stone.

Visual arts also include photography and filmmaking that operate directly with the existing world, portraying the events, people or just cute kittens. Filmmaking often uses handmade imagery to show something that does not exist in the real life. Thus, we have reached computer art, which consists of many previously mentioned arts, but performed in a virtual environment, such as Photoshop. Last but not least is architecture. Incorporating imagination of the author, various artistic methods and techniques results in creating stunning facades that are masterpieces.