essay on perspective in art

A Complete Guide to Perspective in Art

What is perspective in art? Perspective is a technique that artists use to create the appearance of realism in their artwork. It gives the illusion of depth and distance, making an image look more lifelike.

In this blog post, we will discuss what perspective is and how Renaissance artists used it to create stunningly realistic paintings. We will also outline the methods for creating linear perspective and atmospheric perspective in an artwork. Find strategies to increase the realism of your artworks using accurate perspective.

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What is perspective in art?

Perspective is a way of creating the illusion of space , depth and scale in an artwork. It gives objects the appearance of receding into the distance, creating a realistic representation. Perspective can be achieved by manipulating the size and placement of objects within an image to create a sense of three-dimensional space.

Why is perspective important when creating realistic artworks?

Perspective helps create the illusion of realism , space and depth in a two-dimensional work. It allows artists to create more lifelike images that appear three-dimensional. Ultimately, this enhances viewer engagement by drawing them into the painting, creating a more immersive experience.

Perspective and the Renaissance: The history of perspective in art

During the Renaissance , artists like Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci developed a system of linear perspective which involved using mathematical principles to map three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional surface. This allowed them to create realistically proportioned scenes that appeared to recede into the distance.

One of the most famous examples of perspective in Renaissance art is in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper. In this work, da Vinci used linear perspective to create a sense of depth and space within the composition. He did this by using converging lines to create the illusion of the walls of the room receding into the distance.

Another example of da Vinci’s use of perspective is his portrait of Mona Lisa. By utilising foreshortening and atmospheric perspective, he was able to create an image that looked lifelike. The lighter values of the trees disappearing into the fog in the distance adds to this effect. Notice how the details in the portrait of Mona Lisa are full of saturation, contrast and warm tones. Conversely, the background elements are cooler in temperature , lighter in value , softer in appearance and less detailed. This is the effect of atmospheric perspective.

Leonardo da Vinci’s use of perspective was truly revolutionary for its time. His innovative approach helped pave the way for further artistic developments.

Types of perspective in art

Linear perspective and atmospheric perspective are two different ways of creating the illusion of depth in an artwork.

Linear perspective is defined as the use of converging lines and diminishing size to create the illusion that the subjects in a painting are located at a distance.

On the other hand, atmospheric perspective utilises colour, value (lightness or darkness), and texture to create depth within an image.

Linear perspective

Linear perspective is a type of perspective that uses a mathematical system to create the illusion of depth in artwork. It relies on the artist’s understanding of how objects recede into the distance when viewed from one single point. This concept is known as the vanishing point.

Essential components for creating linear perspective include a horizon line, which represents the eye level or vanishing point; orthogonals or lines radiating from the vanishing point; and converging lines, which depict objects at different distances from the viewer.

One point perspective

One point perspective is the form of linear perspective in which all the lines of an image converge at one point. In a landscape or cityscape, one point perspective can be identified by looking for imaginary lines radiating from the same vanishing point.

To construct a one point perspective drawing, begin by drawing a horizon and a vanishing point. Next, draw orthogonal lines (lines radiating outwards from the vanishing point). The next step is to draw your shapes, with edges connecting to the orthogonal lines . Finally, draw in any details, ensuring that all straight lines pass through your single vanishing point.

Two point perspective

Two point perspective is a form of linear perspective which uses two vanishing points instead of one. This type of perspective is useful for scenes here the viewer is looking directly at the corner of a building or room.

Draw the horizon line and make sure that the two vanishing points are spaced out sufficiently. Then draw orthogonal lines converging to each vanishing point, these orthogonal lines can cross. Make sure the outlines of buildings, roads and objects converge to the vanishing points and finish with the details.

Three point perspective is another type of linear perspective that is used to represent taller structures or landscapes viewed from a high or low angle.

Atmospheric perspective

Artists use atmospheric perspective to creates the illusion of depth and distance with colour and value. It is based on the observation that distant objects appear cooler and lighter in colour compared to nearby objects. This is due to the fact that blue light waves are scattered and reflected by molecules and particles in the atmosphere, making distant objects look hazy or blurry.

Atmospheric perspective also affects the appearance of details and edges; distant objects tend to have less defined edges, softer values and fewer details compared to closer elements. Therefore, artists must take this into consideration when creating works that are meant to appear as if they are situated at a great distance from their viewers.

For painters, one way to create the effect of atmospheric perspective is by painting features such as trees or buildings with lighter, cooler colours towards the background. These colours become more saturated and warm near the foreground. Additionally, the blending technique can be useful for softening distant edges. For pencil artists, they should aim to keep lines faint towards the background while gradually increasing pressure as they work towards the foreground. Blending tools, like tortillions can then be used for smoothing out textures and details. This will help add depth to your drawing by instilling a sense of space between elements.

Tips on how to improve perspective in art

• Creating accurate perspective in an artwork can greatly improve the overall impact of a piece. Make sure to get useful drawing tools , like a pencil , ruler and eraser for drawing the straight horizon and orthogonal lines.
• View catchers are also helpful for isolating specific sections of a scene in order to simplify complex compositions
• Learn how to accurately mix colours to improve your portrayal of atmospheric perspective. Add a little titanium white and blue to make distant objects appear cooler.
• When creating a linear perspective drawing, start with light lines that are easy to erase, this way you can fix any mistakes easily.
• When creating atmospheric perspective in a painting, use a blending brush to soften the appearance of distant elements.
• Finally, practice and experiment with different viewpoints! Changing the position of your viewer can help you to create interesting compositions and draw attention to certain focal points in a scene.

Student Resource

Perspective Coursework Guide

From vanishing points to points of view, explore perspective in art

Iwao Yamawaki Bauhaus Student (1930–2) Tate

Introduction

Perspective in art usually refers to the representation of three-dimensional objects or spaces in two dimensional artworks. Artists use perspective techniques to create a realistic impression of depth, 'play with' perspective to present dramatic or disorientating images.

Perspective can also mean a point of view – the position from which an individual or group of people see and respond to, the world around them. You might, for example, hear people saying 'from my perspective' or referring to the point of view of a particular group or set of beliefs: 'the youth perspective' or 'the feminist perspective'.

Make Space! ... the Basics

John Wonnacott The Norwich School of Art (1982–4) Tate

© John Wonnacott

What is perspective and how does it work?

Have you noticed that things look bigger if they are close to you and smaller if they are further away? This is perspective. It is perspective that helps make things look three dimensional – and creates a sense of space receding into the distance. There are two types of persepective: linear perspective, and aerial perspective (sometimes also called atmospheric perspective).

Linear perspective

If you look along a straight road or a railway track, the edges of the road or tracks look as if they are coming together in the distance. This is called linear perspective. With linear perspective parallel lines move together as they recede away from you. The point at which the lines appear to meet is called the vanishing point.

Julian Opie Imagine you are driving (1998–9) Tate

© Julian Opie

To create the impression of a road heading away into the distance, artist Julian Opie has placed a single vanishing point more or less at the centre of the image. The edges of the road meet at this point and suggest a sense of receding space. (Perspective that uses a single vanishing point like this, is sometimes referred to as 'one-point perspective').

Joseph Mallord William Turner Tracing of a Perspective Construction of a House (c.1810) Tate

To represent three-dimensional objects or buildings, artists often use two (or more) vanishing points. Have a look at this sketch by J.M.W. Turner . He has placed a vanishing point at either side of the paper and then drawn the top and bottom lines of the two walls of the building so they meet at these points. The walls look as if they are going back into the distance, which makes the building look three-dimensional.

Artist Ed Ruscha has used two vanishing points (or two-point perspective) in his dramatic drawing of a petrol station. One of the vanishing points is at the bottom right hand corner of the work. The other is off the paper to the left. Can you work out where the vanishing point would have to be for the lines of the front wall and roof of the petrol station to meet there?

Edward Ruscha Standard Study # 3 (1963) ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland

© Ed Ruscha

Aerial or atmospheric perspective

As well as using lines to create the impression of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface, there are other techniques artists use. Aerial perspective or atmospheric perspective refers to the effect that the atmosphere has on the appearance of things when they are looked at from a distance.

William Ratcliffe Hampstead Garden Suburb from Willifield Way (c.1914) Tate

© The estate of William Ratcliffe

If you look at a view from a high building or the top of a hill, buildings, trees, hills and other landscape or city features look blurred or hazy in the distance. The further something is away from you, the less clear its details are and there is less tonal contrast (the contrast between lights and darks). Colours also become less bright the further they are away and blend more into the background colour of the atmosphere – which is blue (unless there is a sunset, when it is red!).

In William Ratcliffe's painting of a suburban street, the houses and gardens in the foreground are detailed and brightly coloured. But the hills, buildings, and trees in the distance are painted in shades of faded blue and purple and it is hard to make out their shapes and details.

Carol Rhodes Ridge (1999) Tate

© Carol Rhodes

Artist Carol Rhodes uses aerial perspective in her paintings of landscapes – which look as if they have lierally been painted from an aeroplane! Ridge 1999 shows a view from above of a vast empty landscape. At first glance it looks like an abstract composition . But we can make out a few details that suggest it is a landscape – the ridge, what looks like a road, and perhaps an airport landing strip. As the landscape stretches into the distance however the features become so indistinct in the atmospheric haze that they are impossible to identify.

Make an Impact!

Once you know how perspective works, you can start messing with it: add a sense of drama (or otherworldly weirdness) to a landscape or cityscape, or explore abstract space.

Dramatic buildings and spaces

Anthony Hernandez's Rome #17 1999 is a photograph of the interior of a building. The space is ambiguous – it looks like a lift shaft in a building that is under construction – but we can't tell if we are looking up or down it. By centralising the vanishing point of the shaft on the paper, so that the image is symmetrical, he creates a dramatic sense of receding space. We seem to be sucked into the image.

The viewpoints chosen by the artists for these photographs also make use of perspective to emphasise and dramatise the structure of the buildings.

Lucia Moholy Bauhaus Building, Dessau, view from the vestibule window looking toward the workshop wing (1926) Tate

© Estate of Lucia Moholy / DACS 2024

Catherine Yass Bankside: Cherrypicker (2000) Tate

Yutaka Takanashi Tokyo-jin (1974, printed 2012) Tate

Surreal landscapes and cityscapes

Surrealist artists used linear perspective to create strange cityscapes with sharp angled buildings and empty receding streets.

Giorgio de Chirico The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913) Tate

© DACS, 2024

Tristram Hillier Alcañiz (1961) Tate

© Estate of Tristram Hillier. All Rights Reserved 2020 / Bridgeman Images

The shadowy receding arcade in Giorgio de Chirico's The Uncertainty of the Poet 1913 adds an eerie backdrop for his odd (and very surreal) foreground still life. Tristram Hillier makes use of perspective to create an equally eerie urban scene of squares, shadows and buildings. The line of trees in Pauls Nash's ghostly landscape painting Pillar and Moon 1932-42, recede to a vanishing point off to the right of the image. By using a vanishing point at the centre of the image, Colin Self draws us into his nightmarish looking garden.

Paul Nash Pillar and Moon (1932–42) Tate

Colin Self Gardens with Green Garden Sculpture (1966–9) Tate

© Colin Self. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024

Artists Yves Tanguy and John Armstrong used aerial perspective in their surreal landscapes. The landscape in Tanguy's Azure Day 1937 , the setting for groups of anthropomorphic figures and buildings, seems to go on indefinitely as it fades out to an indistinct haziness. Armstrong exaggerates the contrast between sharp, in-focus, foreground; and blue, indistinct background to create the dreamlike atmosphere of his painting.

Yves Tanguy Azure Day (1937) Tate

© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2024

Perspective and abstraction

The main idea behind cubism was to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional canvas by bringing together different views of the objects. This often leads to a disorientating sense of perspective. Instead of receding into space objects seem flattened out – or have angles and planes that we don't expect to see.

Juan Gris The Sunblind (1914) Tate

Kurt Schwitters Z 105 Portals of Houses (1918) Tate

Inspired by cubist space, David Hockney messed with realistic perspective, creating abstracted depictions of his studio.

David Hockney Pembroke Studio Interior (1984) Tate

© David Hockney

Hedda Sterne's NY, NY No. X 1948 is a response to the New York City, where she moved to in 1941. The semi-abstract mass of lines and planes that appear to depict rooftops, walls, fences, ladders, fire escapes, towers, wood panels and other constructions, suggest her excitement. You get a sense that she is taking everything in at once and pouring out her impressions onto the canvas. Her clever use of different vanishing points in the painting adds to the look of a chaotic built-up environment and hustle and bustle feel of a big city.

Hedda Sterne NY, NY No. X (1948) Tate

© Estate of Hedda Sterne / DACS 2024, All rights reserved

In contrast to Hedda Sterne's complicated and confusing layers of shapes and perspectives, Vicken Parsons creates spaces that appear simple, but are in fact equally confusing. The largely monochromatic paintings show what appear to be spaces or rooms. He uses persepctive to create a sense of three dimensional depth, but the perspectives shift and challenge what we think we are seeing. The paintings simultaneously invite, but also occasionally prevent, us from imaginatively exploring the rooms. Although the rooms seem empty, presence is suggested through the use of light and shadow, giving the paintings an atmosphere of mystery.

Vicken Parsons Untitled (2010) Tate

© Vicken Parsons

Vicken Parsons Untitled (2012) Tate

Op artist Bridget Riley often plays with perspective in her abstract paintings and prints that explore optical effects. The three-dimensional ridges of Blaze 1964 recede in a mesmerising spiral. While in Untitled [Fragment 1/7] 1965 she manipulates linear perspective to create this three-dimensional abstract shape.

Bridget Riley Untitled [Fragment 1/7] (1965) Tate

© Bridget Riley 2020. All rights reserved.

Explore more examples of artworks that manipulate perspective to create complex layered, or disorientating images:

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva The Corridor (1950) Tate

Richard Smith Vista (1963) Tate

© Richard Smith Foundation

Ron Davis Vector (1968) Tate

© Ron Davis

David Hockney Caribbean Tea Time (1987) Tate

Perspective, ideas and meaning

Thomas Struth also made use of perspective in his photographs of urban scenes. But rather than emphasing the drama of architecture, he used perspective to highlight the ordinary. In 1991, two years after the unification of East and West Berlin, Struth began working on a series of photographs of streets in cities in the former East Germany. The cities had previously been inaccessible from the West. All the photographs are taken from a similar viewpoint: he places the camera in the centre of the road at eye level, creating a one-point perspective that leads the viewer's eye along the streets. The slightly shabby East German world that Struth depicts is one in which time is presented as having stood still.

Thomas Struth Ferdinand-von-Schill-Strasse, Dessau 1991 (1991) Tate

© Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth Schlosstrasse, Wittenberg 1991 (1991) Tate

By using the same approach for all the images, Struth's photographs appear like a scientific record. He doesn't fcous on an interesting bit of the street, or select a dramatic angle – and he gives no hints as to how we should look at the photographs or interpret them. The viewer is left to linger over what might otherwise seem an un-noteworthy, everyday scene. Struth has said about his approach to his photographs that he wants to 'give pause'.

In this artwork by Carey Young , two rows of industrial buildings (yellow on one side and blue on the other) recede dramatically to a single vanishing point at the centre of the image. The stark perspective and symmetry of the buildings contrast sharply with the curled up figure in the foreground. No one else is around, and the emptiness of the scene is heightened by the large expanse of cloudy sky.

Carey Young Body Techniques (after Sculpture II, Kirsten Justesen, 1969) (2007) Tate

© Carey Young, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

The photograph is part of a series by Carey Young called Body Techniques . In each photograph the artist wears a smart two-piece suit and is pictured alone surrounded by recently completed or half-finished construction projects. The photographs were taken in the United Arab Emirates and draw attention to the rapid growth of cities there, stimulated by private and corporate wealth. As the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson has commented, these photographs ‘depict the architecture of multinational commerce as depersonalized and dehumanizing, futuristic yet dusty projects of progress perverted’. Carey Young explores how the human figure fits into these stark environments. But, as Young herself has explained: ‘it is ambiguous whether the artist is molding herself to the landscape or exploring ways of resisting it.’

Sir Don McCullin CBE The Battlefields of the Somme, France (2000) Tate

© Don McCullin

Thomas Struth and Carey Young use perspective to explore an idea. Photographer Don McCullin uses perspective to help visualise the horrors of war. A long road disappears into the distance across acres of flat fields. The photograph records the location of some of the bloodiest battles of the First World War – the Somme. McCullin's choice of viewpoint, focusing on the road rather than battlefields, is a poingnant reminder of the miserable march that so many young soldiers took to their deaths. He chooses a viewpoint looking down the road – making the road seem endless. The perspective exaggerates the huge scale of the battlefields and the suffering and loss of life that happened there.

Perspectives and Voices

Lorna Simpson Five Day Forecast (1991) Tate

© Lorna Simpson, courtesy Salon 94, New York

So far this resource has explored how perspective techniques are used by artists to create the impression of three-dimensional space, and the various ways artists use (and misuse) it to add drama or meaning to an image or create disorientating abstract artworks.

Perspective in art can also be explored in relation to the viewpoint of artists and how they use this in making their work. All of us have an individual perspective which affects how we think about and respond to the world around us. Lots of things affect our perspective including our gender, our race, our cultural background, our education and our histories and experiences.

Many artists use art as a tool to explore their experiences and make people aware of their perspective.

Donald Rodney In the House of My Father (1996–7) Tate

© The estate of Donald Rodney

Artist Donald Rodney explored issues of race and representation from his perspective as young black British artist. He was a leading figure in Britain's BLK Art Group in the 1980s and is recognised as 'one of the most innovative and versatile artists of his generation'. Rodney suffered from the inherited incurable disease sickle cell anaemia and his experiences of being ill and in pain is also something he deals with in his art.

Take a look through Donal Rodney's sketchbooks and find out more about how he used art to explore and put across his experiences and perspectives.

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Sonia Boyce’s artwork From Tarzan to Rambo ... explores the representation of black people in the media from her perspective which she describes as an 'English born Native'.

The artwork developed from her exploration of the relationship between her own 'self-image' and the one offered by a predominantly white society through the mass media (newspapers, films, TV etc). Find out more about Boyce's ideas in this Look Closer resource .

Cindy Sherman Untitled #97 (1982) Tate

© Cindy Sherman

Linder Untitled (1976) Tate

Artists such as Lorna Simpson , Cindy Sherman , Linder and the Guerilla Girls make art from their perspective as feminists. They use art to explore their gender-related experiences within society with the aim of exposing embedded inequalities and showing alternatives to dominant gender roles.

Guerrilla Girls Guerrilla Girls’ Definition Of Hypocrite (1990) Tate

© courtesy www.guerrillagirls.com

The Guerrilla Girls formed in 1984 in reaction to an exhibition called An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture at MoMA (The Museum of Modern Art) in New York. Although the exhibition was supposed to represent the top artists in the world, out of the 169 artists shown only 13 were women. The Guerilla Girls aim to expose sexism and racism in the art world. They make hard-hitting (and often witty) posters, place adverts in newspapers and use direct actions such as demonstrating outside museums, to put across their message.

Find out more about feminist art, the BLK Arts Movement and other groups and movements formed to represent the perspectives of marginalised groups in the art world:

Feminist art

Feminist art is art by artists made consciously in the light of developments in feminist art theory in the early 1970s

Five Stories of Queer Artists

Discover five important stories of queer love and relationships told through art

British black arts movement

The British black arts movement was a radical political art movement founded in 1982 inspired by anti-racist discourse and feminist critique, which sought to highlight issues of race and gender and the politics of representation

Outsider art

Outsider art is used to describe art that has a naïve quality, often produced by people who have not trained as artists or worked within the conventional structures of art production

AfriCOBRA was a Chicago-based group of black artists whose shared aim was to develop their own aesthetic in the visual arts in order to empower black communities

Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic that combines science-fiction, history and fantasy to explore the African-American experience and aims to connect those from the black diaspora with their forgotten African ancestry

MORE FOR STUDENTS AND TEACHERS

Research skills and exam support.

Designed to inspire ideas for research in the gallery, classroom and everyday life

Coursework guides

Resources to inspire and help research GCSE and A Level Art topics featuring artworks and artists from Tate's collection

What is Perspective in Art

Perspective in art refers to the technique used to represent three-dimensional objects and depth on a two-dimensional drawing surface. It creates the illusion of distance and volume on a flat surface like canvas.

The most common types of perspective are linear perspective and atmospheric perspective .

Linear perspective uses vanishing points and converging lines, while atmospheric perspective deals with color and clarity to suggest depth.

Perspective techniques help artists depict a three-dimensional space realistically or stylistically.

Take, for instance, Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” The lines of the walls and ceiling converge at a single point behind Christ’s head, creating a sense of depth and distance.

This is a classic example of linear perspective, one of the many tools in an artist’s kit to create a convincing illusion of reality.

In this blog post, we’ll delve into the fascinating world of perspective in art, exploring its elements, different types, and even common errors artists make.

A Short History of Perspective in Art

Building on this understanding of perspective, let’s delve into the history of perspective.

The technique we now recognize as perspective was largely formalized during the Italian Renaissance in the early 15th century. 

The architect Filippo Brunelleschi played a key role in rediscovering the mathematical laws of perspective, including the pivotal concept of the vanishing point.

These principles were soon applied in painting, with artists like Masaccio leading the way. His fresco “The Holy Trinity” is a testament to this new approach, creating a sense of spatial depth that was revolutionary for its time.

However, as art evolved, so did the use of perspective.

By the end of the 19th century, artists like Paul Cézanne began challenging traditional norms, opting to flatten the conventional Renaissance picture space. This marked a significant shift from a linear perspective, paving the way for Cubism and other modern art movements in the 20th century.

Elements of Perspective

Diving deeper into perspective in art, let’s explore the key elements that can be manipulated to create convincing illusions.

The Horizon Line

The horizon line, also known as the eye level, represents the farthest point of sight where the sky meets the land or water, forming a boundary. This line serves as a reference point, indicating the viewer’s eye level when observing an object, an interior, or an exterior scene.

The placement of the horizon line can dramatically alter the viewer’s perception of the scene. A high horizon line can make the viewer feel like they are looking down on a scene, while a low horizon line can make it seem like the viewer is looking up.

Understanding and effectively utilizing the horizon line is crucial for creating realistic, proportionate drawings with depth and dimension.

Vanishing Point

The vanishing point is the spot on the horizon line where all parallel lines appear to converge, essentially ‘vanishing’ from the viewer’s sight.

As objects recede into the distance, they seem to diminish in size, eventually seeming to merge at this vanishing point. This is a natural phenomenon that our eyes perceive in real life, replicated in the art to create a convincing sense of spatial depth and realism.

If you imagine a straight road stretching into the distance, the sides of the road seem to get closer together the further they extend from a vantage point. Eventually, they appear to meet at a single distant point – this is the vanishing point.

By accurately applying this concept, artists can imbue their flat artwork with a realistic perception of depth, distance, and three-dimensionality.

Orthogonal Lines

Orthogonal lines in the perspective drawing are imaginary lines that recede toward the vanishing point on the horizon line. They are crucial in creating the illusion of depth and three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface.

Orthogonal means “at right angles,” which is how these lines relate to the picture plane in the one-point perspective.

In a two-point perspective, orthogonal lines are at right angles. Although not always visible in the final artwork, these lines guide the artist in accurately depicting spatial relationships and maintaining a realistic perspective.

Ground Plane

The ground plane in perspective drawing refers to the horizontal surface below the horizon line, which could represent land or water. It establishes the sense of depth and spatial relationships in a drawing or painting.

The ground plane is often depicted as level or flat in a typical perspective drawing. Parallel lines drawn on this plane appear to converge at a vanishing point on the horizon line, giving the illusion of depth and distance.

However, if the ground plane were sloped or hilly, the vanishing point created by the path’s parallel lines may not rest on the horizon and may appear as if it’s on an inclined plane. This can create a more dynamic and complex sense of depth and perspective in the artwork.

Converging Lines

Converging lines in perspective art are lines that appear to meet at a common point as they recede into the distance, creating an illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface. This phenomenon, known as the vanishing point, is a fundamental concept in perspective drawing.

For instance, parallel lines, such as railway tracks, converge at a distance. Converging lines create a sense of depth, distance, and dynamism, making flat images appear three-dimensional and more engaging to the viewer.

Types of Perspective in Art

Now that we have understood the elements of perspective let’s delve deeper into the different types of perspectives in art. This section will guide you through the various forms and how they each contribute to creating depth and realism in artworks.

Linear Perspective

Linear perspective is an artistic technique that uses mathematical principles to create a realistic representation of space, depth, and scale in an artwork. It relies on understanding how objects recede into the distance when viewed from one point, known as the vanishing point.

Essential components for creating linear perspective include:

• A horizon line, which represents the eye level or vanishing point.
• Orthogonal lines radiating from the vanishing point.
• Converging lines, which depict objects at different distances from the viewer.

Linear perspective can be categorized into one-point, two-point, and three-point perspectives, depending on the number of vanishing points in the composition.

One-Point Perspective

One-point perspective is a technique in visual art that utilizes one vanishing point on the horizon line to depict depth and distance. It’s typically used for compositions viewed straight on, where all parallel lines appear to converge towards this solitary point.

Think of a long, straight road whose sides seem to merge at a distant spot on the horizon. Similarly, when viewing an object or scene directly, the sides seem to retreat towards a single vanishing point, thus creating an illusion of depth.

This technique allows artists to depict spatial depth and realism in their work, creating engaging visuals that appear to extend beyond the confines of the flat canvas.

Two-Point Perspective

In a two-point perspective, an object is rendered using two vanishing points on the horizon line. This perspective is commonly applied when the object or scene is viewed from an angle rather than directly from the front, resulting in two sets of lines that recede towards two different points on the horizon.

For instance, if you draw a building from its corner, you see two faces of the structure. The edges of these sides, represented by lines in your drawing, extend towards and converge at the two different vanishing points.

This creates a realistic depiction of the building’s dimensional structure, capturing how its size appears to diminish as it extends away from the viewer.

This method proves pivotal in accurately representing spatial relationships within a scene, adding depth and realism to the artwork.

Three-Point Perspective

The three-point perspective uses three vanishing points to portray objects or scenes with notable depth or height.

This technique is commonly used when observing tall structures like skyscrapers or deep canyons, where a third vanishing point appears above or below the horizon line.

For example, consider drawing a towering skyscraper from a worm-eye view. You’ll find two vanishing points on the horizon, where the building’s sides appear to converge, and an additional third point above, where the vertical lines of the skyscraper seem to meet.

This perspective delivers a sense of scale and depth, conveying the immense height of the skyscraper.

Aerial Perspective

Aerial perspective, or atmospheric perspective, refers to how the atmosphere impacts the visual perception of an object viewed from a distance.

This technique mimics how light behaves in real life, reducing distant objects’ intensity and color saturation to simulate depth.

As the distance between an observer and an object increases, the object’s contrast against its background and the contrast of its details diminishes.

Moreover, the colors of the distant objects also lose saturation and tend to blend with the background color, typically taking on a bluish tint.

This is due to the scattering of short-wavelength light in the atmosphere, like blue and violet light. The distant objects might adopt a reddish hue under certain conditions, such as at sunrise or sunset.

An aerial perspective is a vital tool in art, especially landscape painting, to accurately depict depth and distance.

Curvilinear Perspective

Curvilinear, or five-point perspective, is a drawing method that creates a wide-angle ‘fisheye’ view of a scene on a flat surface.

It uses curved lines and straight converging ones to mimic the image on the retina, providing a more accurate representation of visual space than the traditional linear perspective, which only uses straight lines and can appear distorted at the edges.

This technique involves placing four vanishing points around a circle, with a fifth in the center. All vertical lines bend towards the top and bottom points, horizontal lines bend towards the left and right points, and lines going into the picture plane go straight to the center point.

An example of this technique is Parmigianino’s “Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror,” where the artist’s reflection and the surrounding room are depicted in a distorted, spherical image, capturing a wider field of view.

Errors in Perspective Drawing

Drawing in perspective is a skill that requires understanding and practice. However, even experienced artists can sometimes make errors. Here are some common mistakes that artists often make when drawing in perspective:

Accidental Errors (Type I) : These are unintentional mistakes that do not follow any logical pattern. For instance, a vanishing line that unintentionally veers off at an angle can be considered an accidental error.

Ad Hoc Errors (Type II) : These are conscious errors made for practical reasons. For example, when drawing a paved floor interrupted by steps, an artist might alter the vanishing lines at the steps to make the error less noticeable. These errors are understandable as they follow practical logic.

Systematic Errors (Type III) : These errors are part of a coherent network based on certain rules of construction or principles of organization. For instance, in Fra Filippo Lippi’s “Madonna and Child,” the vanishing lines converge at the Virgin’s eyes, which could be seen as an artistic expression of a binocular vision.

Incorrect Foreshortening : Foreshortening is a technique that creates the illusion of an object receding strongly into the distance or background. Errors in foreshortening can lead to objects appearing distorted. For example, if the spacing between horizontal lines does not diminish rapidly enough as they approach the vanishing point, the resulting image can appear distorted.

Over-Foreshortening : This occurs when the spaces between the horizontal lines diminish too rapidly as they approach the vanishing line, resulting in a network of convex diagonals.

Perspective in art is more than just a technique. It’s a language that communicates depth, space, and realism in a two-dimensional medium.

Remember that mastering perspective is a journey.

Practice, observe, and don’t be disheartened by errors—they’re stepping stones to improvement. A deeper understanding of perspective can enrich your appreciation of artworks and the skill behind them.

So, keep perspective in mind whether you’re creating art or simply admiring it. It’s the bridge that connects the viewer, the artist, and the artwork, transforming lines and colors into lifelike scenes and stories.

If you are a beginner looking to hone your drawing skills, check out our courses “ Fundamentals of Drawing ” and “ Learn to Draw in 21 Days .” 

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You can also check out the collection of our online art courses to find the perfect course for yourself.

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An Exploration in Perspective Drawing Essay

Historical context of perspective drawing, math used in perspective drawing.

Bibliography

Perspective drawings entails portraying three dimensional spaces into two dimensional spaces, and are classified into aerial and linear perspective. Historically, perspective drawing was examined by philosophers including Euclid, Roger Bacon, and Robert Grosseteste according to their professions, and the way they made observations of the visible world.

Duccio and Giotto immensely contributed to the study of perspectives through paintings representing real world observations. The underlying goal was to accurately describe what a viewer was seeing with changing vision changed, leading to the mathematical theories of perspective drawing by Piero della Francesca in 1478. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) discovered drawing machines as illustrated in figure 1 below, where different positions of the same object are attained because of variations in viewing positions.

Figure 1. Drawing machine.

Other contributions were made by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), where geometry and painting were combined, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) on the ‘practice of geometry’, Girard Desargues (1591-1661) on ‘projective geometry’ for slotting a point , x, for mapping points to points and lines to lines, as shown in figure 2 below, the advent and propagation of the use of mathematics in perspective drawing.

Figure 2. points and lines

The mathematics used in perspective drawing includes a one point, two point, and three point perspective.

One point perspective

One point perspective is defined by diminishing points as the distance from the observer increases. Take a specific point of choice as the center point and eye point of an object with the axes of the objects having parallel orientations to the drawing plane as an example. If the center point is cp= [6.0, 5.0, 2.0], and the eye point is ep= [6.0,-15.0, 2.0], and the y=l plane is parallel to the x and y axes, there is no rotation because dp= [0, 20, 0]. In this case, the position of the center point is the vanishing point. Figure 2 illustrates one point perspective with one point projection axes. The projection plane is pierced only by one principal axis (Z 1 ).

Figure 3. one point perspective

Two point perspective

The projection plane is pierced by two principal axises in a two point perspective as shown in figure 4 below. If the eye point is ep= [16.0,-15.0, 2.0], and the center point is cp= [6.0, 5.0, 2.0], such that there is a rotation about the z axis, by taking dp= [-10, 20, 0], then, for y=l and z-axis are parallel. The y 2 axis does not pierce the axis. Axes or points can rotate in this system.

Figure 4. two point perspective

Three point perspective

The three point perspective occurs when the line of projection is pierced by three principal axes. As illustrated in figure 5 below, the projection plane is pierced by the X 3 , Y 3 , and Z 3 axes. 1

Figure 5. three point perspective

How perspective drawing involves the mathematical ideas

Mathematical ideas are involved in perspective drawing because it lies on the rations of the objects that are drawn as illustrated in figure 6 below.

Figure 6. Two and three point perspectives

Barsky, Brian A. A Note on the Mathematics of Two- and Three- Point Perspective https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~barsky/perspective.html#one%20point,1998

Boyer, Carl B., A history of mathematics , Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985.

Treibergs, Andrejs, The Geometry of Perspective Drawing on the Computer http://www.math.utah.edu/~treiberg/Perspect/Perspect.htm#intro,2001

1 Andrejs Treibergs, The Geometry of Perspective Drawing on the Computer.

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IvyPanda. (2023, December 4). An Exploration in Perspective Drawing. https://ivypanda.com/essays/an-exploration-in-perspective-drawing/

"An Exploration in Perspective Drawing." IvyPanda , 4 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/an-exploration-in-perspective-drawing/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'An Exploration in Perspective Drawing'. 4 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "An Exploration in Perspective Drawing." December 4, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/an-exploration-in-perspective-drawing/.

1. IvyPanda . "An Exploration in Perspective Drawing." December 4, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/an-exploration-in-perspective-drawing/.

IvyPanda . "An Exploration in Perspective Drawing." December 4, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/an-exploration-in-perspective-drawing/.

• “Short Eyes” Film by Miguel Piñero and the Biopic “Piñero” by Ichaso
• Comparing and Contrasting Duccio’s and Raphael’s ‘Adoration of the Magi’
• Rene Girard's Social Theories
• Four Apostles’ by Albrecht Dürer: Protestant Faith
• The Impact of Patron in Art
• Giotto as the First Renaissance Painter
• Albrecht Durer: The Renaissance Mind Mirrored in Art
• Paolo and Francesca's Fate in Dante's Divine Comedy
• Task-Based Language Teaching among Omani Young Learners
• Albrecht Ritschl: What Went Wrong?
• The painting "Planting Chrysanthemums"
• Early Netherlandish Painting: Triptych of Madonna and Child with Angels; Donor and His Patron Saint Peter Martyr; and Saint Jerome and His Lion by the Master of the Legend of Saint Lucy
• Vincent van Gogh: Changes in the Technique
• Aristotle With a Bust of Homer Rembrandt
• Jackson Pollock: Portrait and a Dream

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Philosophical Perspectives on Art

Stephen Davies, Philosophical Perspectives on Art , Oxford University Press, 2007, 279pp., $75.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199202423.

Reviewed by Christian Helmut Wenzel, National Chi Nan University, Taiwan

This book consists of a collection of articles that appeared between 1984 and 2006, plus an introduction. All articles appeared originally in English, but one has been translated from the Spanish. They are all written in an abstract and argumentative style. Thus the book is analytic and not historical in method. There are also no pictures and very little by way of examples. In the essays, Davies pursues universal and essentialist claims. Officially there are two parts to the book, but due to its being a collection of previously published essays there is naturally much overlap and the dividing line is not clear. The first part is concerned with the distinctive character of artworks, the possibility of defining art, and the question of whether art is universal for all human beings. The second part is about interpretation and appreciation, art's meaning, truth, emotions, and expressiveness.

After his book Themes in the Philosophy of Music of 2003 and the more introductory and student-friendly The Philosophy of Art of 2006 for the Blackwell series Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts, Davies has put together some less introductory and more demanding essays for his new Philosophical Perspectives on Art of 2007. But the themes and positions are naturally similar to those expressed in his previous work. There are sixteen chapters -- ranging from fundamental discussions about the definition of art, where the author sometimes does indeed "theorize not about the nature of art but about theorizing about art" (23), to more concrete topics such as biology, architecture, metaphors, meaning, and expression in art. Nevertheless, the general mode of thought remains a rather abstract one.

The first essay asks whether art is more like gold or more like parking tickets: in general, "the way we view and categorize the world is shaped by our desires and projects as much as by the world's independent structure" (24); parking tickets are more of the former kind, the results of our desires and projects, whereas gold we think of as existing independently of us. One might be tempted to say that art belongs to the first kind of objects, because it is created by us. But Davies argues that art belongs, similarly to weed and seagulls, to an intermediate domain between gold and parking tickets (essay 1): what counts as a weed or as art depends on us as well as on what we find and meet with in the world around us. I think Davies takes such a position because he believes that art is universal, human, and to be found everywhere, whereas parking tickets are not. Although he prefers to locate art in the domain of culture and not biology (essay 7), he still favors essentialism (essay 2). This seems to me to be why Davies takes an intermediate position regarding the ontology of art. Especially through his essentialist commitment, this is a more traditional position than most of what we find in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, Davies says that "the aesthetic, as traditionally understood, has made something of a comeback recently" (28), and if this is true, it seems to me he will be in good company.

Davies defends essentialism against cluster theory if the latter is taken as undercutting essentialism. Saying that something is art if it satisfies, say, eight out of ten criteria, is still, he claims, a way of defining art and therefore still a type of essentialism. “The cluster account deserves to be taken seriously precisely because it provides a plausible description of what kinds of things can make something art. Rather than counting against essentialism in aesthetics, it indicates another way for essentialism to be true" (42). There is much to be said for this, but I don't think it goes as far as Davies wants it to. Cluster theory certainly gives a definition, but an essence derived from this definition is, I think, somewhat fuzzy. Whatever criterion from the list of ten one chooses, it does not need to be met in all cases. It often is, but sometimes is not. This creates fuzziness that is similar to mere family resemblance. It seems to me that Davies underestimates this aspect of fuzziness in cluster theory and the way it affects and somewhat modifies traditional essentialism.

Davies briefly discusses the pros and cons of functionalism and proceduralism, the former claiming that art satisfies a need for aesthetic experience, the latter taking it that art is art in virtue of being baptized as such. After this, there is a slightly longer essay on the notion of non-Western art. Davies begins with the observation that "the members of all cultures have always engaged in storytelling, drawing, carving and whittling, song, dance, and acting or mime" (51), and it therefore does not come as a surprise that he defends a universalist position. The "ubiquity" of these practices "suggests that art is universal" (51). Languages might differ, but concepts don't need to. "The crux concerns the concepts possessed within non-Western cultures, not the vocabularies of their languages" (55). That is certainly true, yet I wonder whether it is that easy. I doubt that the concepts appear to be so universal and language independent once we take a closer look at certain practices and values. Wittgenstein for instance once wrote: "Chinesische Gesten verstehen wir so wenig, wie chinesische Sätze" (Big Typescript), and I think there is a point to this. Although I have sympathy for the idea that "there is a transcultural notion of the aesthetic" (60), I also have some reservations. How difficult things can be is something I have tried to bring out in "Beauty in Kant and Confucius. A First Step", Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33/1 (2006), pp. 95-107.

I have a general worry and concern regarding Davies' analytic approach and many others of its kind (although I am sympathetic to analytic philosophy as much as to historical approaches). Davies' discussion is not only written but also conceived in English and in a certain framework: almost all the literature and theories he refers to are taken from the framework of the English-speaking, analytic literature of the last fifty years. There is no discussion of theories put forward in France or Italy (there is a little discussion of Kant on free and dependent beauty, in essay 6), and there is nothing about Africa or South America. Japan and China have not only produced works of art but also theories of art. If philosophy wants to make universal claims -- and I think it usually does, and justly so -- it will be useful to look into such other traditions as well. Especially if one favors contextualism, as Davies does ("when it comes to the ontology of art, I favor contextualism", 76), this should be an obvious thing to do. Davies also rightly observes that "it is only in confrontation with the 'other', with an intrusive alien presence, that the society is forced to define itself, to reflect on its own character" (55), and I suggest that analytic philosophy, as we know it from the English-speaking traditions of the twentieth century, also has a history and is therefore in need of such a "confrontation", especially when it makes claims to universality.

Art is usually understood as historical and reflexive within the tradition it belongs to. But then there arises the problem of how to explain "first art." Davies faces this problem by

arguing for the existence of aesthetic properties (essay 5). One of the few places where Davies explicitly takes up an issue that is not (at least not only) from the last fifty years of English language discussions is his treatment of free and dependent beauty in Kant. He finds these notions problematic and not convincing. "Six-limbedness counts against beauty in people, but not in Hindu gods or insects". This is true, but Kant would not say that 'six-limbedness' is an object of beauty to start with, because it is too conceptual. Furthermore, Davies observes that "in the later decades of the twentieth century, some analytic philosophers of art challenged the constellation of ideas that made up the inheritance of Enlightenment aesthetics" (86). This is also true, but it sounds as if nothing had happened in Europe during the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, which certainly is not the case.

Regarding Ellen Dissanayake's evolutionary account of art (essay 7), Davies acknowledges that "her position avoids the trivializing reductions of most ethological approaches, which tie beauty to sexual attractions and see the interest and value of art exhausted by its potential as a tool for seduction" (110), and he also admits that her view "applies most comfortably to what might be called 'low' or 'folk' art" (114). But in the end, he observes, we need more than biological perspectives. We need cultural aspects to account for the more highly-developed art forms, especially for art for its own sake. Dissanayake herself is aware of this, but instead of introducing cultural aspects to account for such art forms, she concludes, according to Davies, that "this comparatively recent European conception of art is aberrant" (114). But it seems to me that Dissanayake might have given up too easily. I think one can make an argument in evolutionary terms even for the case of art for its own sake. Contemplation can be a good and useful thing, for oneself as well as for others, and communities might leave a niche for it and be selected for doing this.

When it comes to the "meaning" of art, Davies favors an "original context theory", over a "modern" one: "The creation and appreciation of literature answers primarily to an interest [not] in works alone … [but] to works as the product of human authors" (149), and he argues that this still allows for multiple interpretations of works of art. He strongly defends the view that "the meaning of a literary work is fixed by factors holding at the time of the work's creation" (149), and he regards opposing postmodern theories as "counterintuitive" (161). Context theory is taken up again in another essay, where he discusses three theories of intentionalism: actual, hypothetical, and contextual. These turn out to be not as different from each other as has often been claimed (essay 11). They merely disagree over whether we should aim "to disclose what was meant, to consider what might have been meant, or to present the work in a manner that makes it most valuable as literature" (189). Davies argues that the third approach should be the preferred one. It even turns out that two or more conflicting interpretations can be true at the same time (essay 12). A literary work can have more than one meaning, and a sentence allows for more than one reading.

In the last chapter, Davies criticizes a version of Expression Theory that he takes to be its "ur-form". This theory "explains art's expressiveness as arising from artists' expressing their concurrent emotions of feelings in the production of art" (241-2). He says the view is widespread, but he thinks it is mistaken because "it is not common for most artists to work creatively under the duress of emotion" (242). The expressiveness of artworks does not reflect the artist's emotion as tears indicate sadness. Artists simply don't create their works in this way. Nevertheless, I must admit that on first blush it seemed to me that when looking at a painting by Vincent van Gogh and having just read his letters to his brother Theo, it will be difficult to avoid having the feeling that one sees things a bit the way he saw them and that one shares his emotions to some extent. Van Gogh certainly painted passionately, and his feelings are intertwined with his ways of seeing things. Feelings are complex and cannot be fully grasped by a simple word such as "sadness". But Davies offers a fine-tuned analysis of emotional expressiveness that sheds some light on what is actually going on. He distinguishes between three kinds of expressiveness: (1) unintentional, unreflected, and natural (primary) expressions; (2) intentional, reflected, and non-constitutive (secondary) expressions, an understanding of which presupposes independent knowledge of the agent's intentions and circumstances; and (3) expressions that rely on conventions and rituals (tertiary expressions of emotions). Davies then argues that the expressiveness of art is more of the second and third and much less of the first kind than we usually think. This indeed makes sense in the van Gogh case I introduced above, because there we have some additional knowledge through his letters. Besides the threefold distinction, this essay also offers several detailed discussions of how the expressiveness of art and the artists' own emotions must be distinguished in various cases and circumstances. Although van Gogh is "responsible" for the work's expressiveness, "appearances of primary expressions" do not need to " be primary expressions" (255).

All in all, this is a useful and stimulating book. The sixteen essays collected in it not only give "philosophical perspectives on art", as the title promises, but also offer sharp analyses that still form a unity.

What Is Perspective In Art? ( For Beginners)

Perspective in art is what gives your work a 3D look rather than a flat painting or drawing. It sounds complicated and boring but it is actually quite simple and is probably something you already understand but just haven’t applied it to your work.

Understanding perspective in art makes your work look real and in proportion. Learning how to use perspective to add distance along with using proper values, will give depth to your painting or drawing and make it so much more interesting and realistic. To learn more about using value you can read my post on Value in Art .

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Defining Perspective in Art

Lets start with a few definitions and then I will give a more in-depth explanation.

Perspective  –a technique that enables artists to add the illusion of depth to a painting or drawing. There are several “types” of perspective as explained below.

Viewpoint – the position from where you view your scene. So a normal viewpoint would be looking at a scene or object at eye level.

You can also have a low viewpoint where you are looking at your subject from below, such as looking up to a balcony. High viewpoint would be looking down on a subject, such as looking down at a beach from a high cliff.

Horizon Line – the imaginary horizontal line in the distance that is eye level.

Vanishing Lines – lines drawn from the object to a point or points on the horizon. The point where these lines meet is called the vanishing point .

I hope these definitions didn’t confuse you too much. It is much easier than it seems and you don’t need to remember the name of these terms to make a good piece of art. You just have to understand what you are seeing.

So, let’s see how to incorporate this information into your artwork.

Finding the Horizon Line

The horizon line is mostly used in landscape drawing or painting but it can also be used in indoor scenes and still life as well.

It’s easy to find the horizon line if you are standing on a beach looking out at the ocean. The horizon line is where the sky meets the sea.

Don’t confuse skyline with horizon line. The horizon line in a mountain scene for example, would most likely be at a point lower than where the peaks meet the sky, probably at the base of the mountains or the banks of a lake. It would depend on your perspective or point of view.

Draw your horizon line parallel to the top and bottom edges of your paper or canvas. Where you place it will determine whether your viewers are looking at the scene from above, below or directly in front.

The horizon line in your painting or drawing doesn’t have to be in the centre of your paper or canvas, and in fact, most of the time it shouldn’t be. You will give your piece more visual interest if your horizon line is slightly above or below the centre.

Everything above the horizon line would slightly slope down towards the line. Everything below the horizon line would slightly slope up towards the line.

Types of Perspective in Art

One Point Perspective

– when you look down a long, straight road, the edges of the road give the illusion of meeting at a point on the horizon. This is one point perspective because you have one vanishing point.

One point perspective is used when you are looking straight at an object or scene from the front.

Two Point Perspective

– when you look at an object from an angle as opposed to directly in front, you will have two vanishing points on the horizon.

Three Point Perspective

– if you are looking at something very tall such as a skyscraper or very tall tree, you will have a third vanishing point above the object. You can also have a third vanishing point if you are looking down into a deep canyon for example.

Linear Perspective

– the further away an object gets, the smaller it will appear. So if you are drawing or painting a house with a large tree in the distance, the tree would be painted or drawn much smaller than the house.

Linear perspective will give you the illusion of distance.

Aerial or Atmospheric Perspective

– objects in the distance appear less detailed and lighter. They often have a cool blue tone. If you have ever looked at mountains in the distance they appear to be a soft, fuzzy blue tone with no definition of the foliage growing on them.

Draw or Paint What You See

Always draw what you see, not what you know. If you look at a line of street lights on a straight road, you know that they are all the same height and approximate distance apart.

If you draw them like that, you will have no depth or distance, the drawing will be flat. You need to draw the light poles progressively smaller and closer together in order to give the illusion of distance.

Practice drawing perspective in your sketchbook or on paper every day. Hold your thumb or a pencil or other straight object straight out in front of you and compare it to objects closer together and farther away.

Look at a house close to you and a tree further away.  See how the measurements compare. Draw what you see.

Don’t be frustrated when you don’t get it right. That’s how we learn.

Analyze your drawing to see where you might have gone wrong. Make notes in your sketchbook about what you think needs improving or what you are struggling with.

Tracing to See Perspective

A lot of artists frown on tracing your subject using tracing paper. They see it as “cheating”.

I think tracing is a fantastic tool for new artists. It not only enables you to get an accurate drawing quickly but it also teaches you how to draw what you see.

When I first began to draw I bought several pads of tracing paper. I traced every picture I could find and compared the tracing to the original photo.

This gave me a much clearer idea of proportions and how things got smaller as they recede back into the distance.

When you can view a scene without all the color and shading you realize that everything just comes down to basic shapes and lines drawn in proportion.

Try it out and see if it is a technique that helps you. If you need more information on how to use tracing paper, read my post on How to Transfer a Reference Photo .

Over time you will not need the tracing paper and will be able to draw most scenes free hand. I still occasionally using tracing paper when I am drawing or painting a portrait to insure accuracy, since even a tiny discrepancy can change the whole look of a face.

When Not To Use Perspective In Art

I always say there are no hard and fast rules in art and that is also true with perspective. If you are going for a realistic drawing or painting it is best to follow these guidelines, but if you want to do a more abstract piece you can ignore them and do your own thing.

Maybe you want to have your central figure or object stand out and draw or paint it out of proportion to the rest of your piece. You could do a whimsical painting full of misshapen, out of proportion buildings or trees.

Anything is possible, you are the creator so use your imagination and have fun.

Thanks for reading.

About The Author

7 thoughts on “what is perspective in art ( for beginners)”.

Thank you Donna. You have explained the topic perspective in very simple words. I am biggner & it is very useful for me.

Thank You for your time and expertise! Diana

This is a really helpful post esp. for a beginner like me. Thank you. And i like the positive energy i feel in your writing.

Thank you! 😊

this was very to thanks for definion and for explaining these topics

Excellent article!

Thank you Donna! I am glad it was helpful. 🙂

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How John Berger changed our way of seeing art

Reader in Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London

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Vikki Bell receives funding from Economic and Social Research Council

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The opening to John Berger’s most famous written work, the 1972 book Ways of Seeing , offered not just an idea but also an invitation to see and know the world differently: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” he wrote.

Berger, who died on January 2 at the age of 90, has had a profound influence on the popular understanding of art and the visual image. He was also a vibrant example of the public intellectual, using his position to speak out against social injustices and to lend his support to artists and activists across the world.

Berger’s approach to art came most directly into the public eye in four-part BBC TV series, Ways of Seeing in 1972, produced by Mike Dibb and which preceded the book. Yet his style of blending Marxist sensibility and art theory with attention to small gestures, scenes and personal stories developed much earlier, in essays for the independent, weekly magazine New Stateman (between 1951 and 1961) and also in his first novel A Painter of Our Time , published in 1958.

The BBC programmes brought to life and democratised scholarly ideas and texts through dramatic, often witty, visual techniques that raised searching questions about how images – from European oil painting to photography and modern advertising – inform and seep into everyday life and help constitute its inequities. What do we see? How are we seen? Might we see differently?

“Berger’s theoretical legacy”, the Indian academic Rashmi Doraiswamy wrote recently , “is in situating the look in the context of political otherness”. Berger’s idea that looking is a political act, perhaps even a historically constructed process – such that where and when we see something will affect what we see – comes across most powerfully in the second episode of Ways of Seeing – which focused on the male gaze.

Here Berger showed the continuities between post-Renaissance European paintings of women and imagery from latter-day posters and girly magazines, by juxtaposing the different images – showing how they similarly rendered women as objects. Berger argued that this continuity constrained how certain forms of femininity are understood, and therefore the terms on which women are able to live their lives. He identified a splitting of the European woman’s consciousness, in which she:

has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.

Historical context, scale, and how we see were recurring themes in Berger’s writing, films, performance and in his collaborative photographic essays with Jean Mohr , Anne Michaels , Tereza Stehliková and others.

Berger’s essays and books on the photograph worry at the political ambiguity of meaning in an image. He taught us that photographs always need language, and require a narrative of some sort, to make sense.

He also took care to differentiate how our reaction to photographs of loved ones depends on our relationship to the person portrayed. In A Seventh Man , a collaborative book with Jean Mohr on Turkish migrant workers to Germany in the 1970s, he put it simply:

A photograph of a boy in the rain, a boy unknown to you or me. Seen in the darkroom when making the print or seen in this book when reading it, the image conjures up the vivid presence of the unknown boy. To his father it would define the boy’s absence.

Under the skin

Because he had been a painter, Berger was always a visual thinker and writer. In conversation with the novelist Michael Ondaatje he remarked that the capabilities of cinematographic editing had influenced his writing. He identified cinema’s ability to move from expansive vistas to close-up shots as that to which he most related and aspired.

Certainly Berger’s work is infused with a sensitivity to how long views – the narratives of history – come alive only with the addition of “close-up” stories of human relationships, that retell the narrative but from a different angle. For instance, writing about Frida Kahlo’s compulsion to paint on smooth skin-like surfaces, Berger suggested that it was Kahlo’s pain and disability (she had spina bifida and had gone through treatments following a bad road accident) that “made her aware of the skin of everything alive —- trees, fruit, water, birds, and naturally, other women and men”.

The character in Ondaatje’s novel, In the Skin of a Lion, to whom he gave the name Caravaggio, was partly inspired by Berger’s essay on the painter . In that essay, Berger wrote of a feeling of “complicity” with the Renaissance Italian artist Caravaggio, the “painter of life” who does not “depict the world for others: his vision is one that he shares with it”.

Berger’s writerly inclinations and sensitivities seem to echo something of the “overall intensity, the lack of proper distance” for which Caravaggio was so criticised – and which Berger so admired. This intensity was not a simple theatricality, nor a search for something truer to life, but a philosophical stance springing from his pursuit of equality. He gave us permission to dwell on those aspects of our research or our lives that capture us intensely, and to trust that sensitivity. His was an affirmative politics in this sense. It started with a trust in one’s intuitions, along with the imperative to open these up to explore ourselves as situated within wider social and historical processes.

Reflecting on his written work, Berger wrote in the recent Penguin collection Confabulations :

What has prompted me to write over the years is the hunch that something needs to be told and that, if I don’t try to tell it, it risks not being told.

He knew very well that writing has its limitations. By itself, writing cannot rebalance the inequities of the present or establish new ways of seeing. Yet he wrote with hope. He showed us in his work and – by example – other possibilities for living a life that was committed to criticising inequality, while celebrating the beauty in the world, giving attention to its colour, rhythm and joyous surprises. We remain endowed and indebted to him.

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The development of perspective in art history

• Perspective
• Oil painting
• Speedpainting
• Visual-test pictures

Perspective [3]: Art historical development of perspective

Introduction: what is the perspective.

" Item Perspectiva is a Latin word, meaning a view-through ." This is how Duerer tried to paraphrase the term perspective ..." ... This is how Erwin Panofsky introduces his essay " Perspective as a symbolic form ". In fact, it makes the most sense methodically to first delimit the phenomenon conceptually by following the Panofsky definition: "... We want to speak, and only there, of a "perspective view of space" in the full sense, where not only individual objects, such as houses or pieces of furniture, are represented in a "shortening", but where the whole picture [...] has transformed itself into a "window", as it were, through which we are supposed to look into the space - in other words, where the material surface of painting and relief [...] is to be seen....] is reinterpreted into a mere picture plane, on which one and through which one sees oneself and all individual objects are projected into a comprehensive overall space - whereby it does not matter whether this projection is determined by the immediate sensual impression or by a more or less "correct" geometric construction.

The "View-through" (after Duerer) is therefore to be understood as a "window view". This formulation also corresponds to that of Leon Battista Alberti , who wrote down his findings on perspective in 1426 in the treatise "De Pittura" (on the art of painting). A few years earlier Filippo Brunelleschi had, in the opinion of many art historians, created the first perspective picture panels of modern times (1410). He influenced Masaccio , among others, who created some wall frescoes according to the perspective method. This also includes the Brancacci Chapel in the Florentine church of Santa Maria del Carmine , painted in 1424 by Masaccio and his teacher Masolino. "This work is so grandiose, so expressive and so subversive in perspective, colour, expression and attitude that even centuries later the young painters and sculptors (like Michelangelo ) will pilgrimage to Carmine Church to study there. Source: Wikipedia.

Excursus: Seeing the world with the eye

Regardless of whether it is a "look through" or a "window view" or an "average pyramid of sight" (Alberti) - all definitions of perspective have one thing in common: seeing. Understanding the meaning of perspective requires a scientific digression. Does seeing function perspectively?

According to today's scientific theory, seeing works in principle like this (roughly simplified): The light of the sun is reflected by the environment surrounding us. The photons race as light rays in all directions, and some of them fall into the eye. There it is converted by photoreceptors in the retina into electrical impulses, which then take a very complicated path: in various processing steps the information is bundled, summarized and structured.

Seeing is therefore NOT the absorption of light information in the eye, but the entire processing process.

In the end, the structured information is transmitted to the brain, where it is combined with other sensory information before it settles on huge brain areas and thus embodies our visual image of the world. So our visual image of the world is not reality in itself, but what is filtered out by the evolutionary process of processing. In the context of perspective, it is of course important to mention that light always hits the eye in a straight line.

Stereoscopic vision - the world is 3D

The world in which we live is naturally a three-dimensional one. Our entire physical experience is based on the fact that we are in a space and can move. However, the retina is only two-dimensional (though curved). But nature was smart: it gave us two eyes that allow " stereoscopic vision ". So we always see the world from two perspectives. As mentioned before, this information is then bundled and combined so that we have a three-dimensional picture of the world.

According to current scientific knowledge, the processing mechanisms of the eye are based on textures, invariances and motion. The term "perspective" does not appear. Perspective perception seems to be irrelevant for sensory processing.

Images are 2D

The perspective in its "meaning of looking through" is based on a phenomenon that was originally only inherent in images: two-dimensionality. Perspective is an "invention" (not a "discovery"!) oriented towards the visual mechanism to simulate our three-dimensional visual experience on a two-dimensional background. Perspective vision is a learned process that is not insignificantly connected with perspective images. This is the only way to explain why so many cultures and epochs managed completely without perspective images. This is how B. Schweitzer in his essay " The sense of the perspective " (1953) states: "Infinite earth and time spaces are filled with an unperspective art".

I see myself seeing myself!

There is a considerable step between the picture itself and the perspective pictures: the invention of depicting seeing itself. Our consciously controllable gaze is no longer that of "pure" seeing (i.e. for the sake of survival), but that of seeing consciously can also be called "visible seeing". Or as Paul Valery remarks: "I see myself seeing myself!

The artistic intention is thus enriched by one theme: the conscious representation of what one sees. This seems so self-evident to us today - above all because the two-dimensional world of images is increasingly displacing the real world. At the beginning of the Renaissance, the invention of perspective was a sensation.

The meaning of images

Previously, two-dimensional images served primarily social-religious purposes. Why should what you see be captured in a picture? The intention before was to create "magical" images. It made much more sense for medieval artists to create images that were somewhat different, much more (!) than just the reality seen. By the way, the same applies to most non-European cultures.

The picture on the left shows a detail from "The Death of Mary" (around 1310) by Giotto di Bondone . The halos still cover the room and the figures.

The Invention of Perspective in Antiquity

From an art-historical point of view, like so much that changed the world at the beginning of the Renaissance, has long since been invented in antiquity. This also applies to the perspective. The Greek artists of the early 5th century B.C., with their increasing self-confidence and their (since Homer) humanized round dance of gods, invented the representation of the social-religious as something seen, as something of this reality. At the same time, however, this vision did not initially refer to a spatial illusion in the sense of a window view (according to Panofsky), but merely to the physical representation of figures and objects. It was a form of "body perspective" (B. Schweitzer). The artistic methods for the depicted plasticity were the (observed) shortening (e.g. with arms or weapons) and superimposition (e.g. with robes or legs).

At first, only the bodies were worthy of representation, not the surrounding space, which was inferior as mere "in-between" ( Plato ). It is certainly no coincidence - to exaggerate - that the pictorial works from this period are almost exclusively vases (or their fragments). A vase has no left or right, no middle or side. They offer no visible space, they are not part of a frozen reality.

The illusionistic backdrop

On this basis, the Greeks developed a different form of pictorial work, which, however, have been handed down to us mainly from Roman antiquity: the illusionistic backdrop. The Greek theater gave rise to the "stage design", which, in the background, functioned only as a backdrop, the Skenographia. This "inferior illusion of this world" of houses, for example, was not a work in itself, but merely a decorative accessory.

Based on this, illusionistic wall frescoes were created, which are known to us mainly from Roman villas. These are works of art in an interior that imitate a view into an exterior space.

Painted windows in Roman villas

According to Panofsky's definition, it does not matter whether the illusionistic window view is observed or constructed. According to this, one can speak of the first truly perspectival pictures in the wall paintings in the Roman villas.

The Romans probably already knew a construction method, but not a central perspective, which only crystallized in the Renaissance, but an "angular perspective". This is not based on a flat window average, but rather on the concave arched inner eye. The vanishing points of these pictures are usually distributed along a vertical axis. By the way, Damianos already defined "Skenographia" in the second century A.D. as a part of "Optics" that "examines how the reproduction of buildings in painting must be structured".

The invention of the vanishing point perspective at the beginning of the Renaissance

After the Roman artists had already created illusionistic mural paintings and thus perspective pictures, the perspective was forgotten in the emerging Middle Ages. The ancient representation of (observed) plastic bodies with an "inferior" in between was adopted by the Eastern Roman artists. It manifested itself in the Byzantine mosaics. In the Western Roman culture there was a radical break with the previous tradition of representation. Building on the Christian philosophical metaphysics of light, a purely planar form of representation developed. The pictures now emerged from the line - the surfaces formed by lines were of equal value. The loss of all spatiality led to the fundamental unification of figure and ground.

"Figure and ground" becomes "body and space"

The decisive step at the end of the 13th century was the renewed separation of figure and ground. Giotto and Duccio in particular deserve the credit for having transformed "figure and ground" into "body and space". At the beginning of the Renaissance, a changing world view with a new role for man led to the need to invent new images. This newly developed process was able to visually construct any imagined reality. "A logocentric rationality has defined the (two-dimensional) question of representation (of space) as the rational manner of construction." (from " Zur Perspektive als konstruktivem Prinzip " by Peter Weibel , 1990).

In the illustration on the left, pay attention to the construction of the urban architecture in the foreground (click on the picture to enlarge).

The Trinity of Masaccio

This change, which again focused on "visible vision", brought about the qualitative equal treatment of figure and space in contrast to antiquity. This equal treatment presupposed an idea of the equality of the represented, and the idea of a geometricizable reality led to the invention of a mathematically justifiable construction method. The Lorenzetti brothers were the first to invent a vanishing point, according to Panofsky. The best known of the early, strictly constructed pictorial works is Masaccio's fresco of the Trinity. Building on this one vanishing point, which was the counterpart of the observer's eye point, it was Brunellesci who was the first to create a general construction method that made any space constructible with a ground plan and elevation drawing. And it was Alberti who finally generalized the mathematically theoretically exact derivation of the visual pyramid average with his "Trattato della pittura" (treatise on painting, 1436).

(Picture right) Wikipedia says: "The Trinity is a fresco in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. It was created between 1425 and 1428 by Masaccio. It is considered groundbreaking for European art because it was the first time in painting that an artist correctly applied the laws of perspective". ( Source )

Perspective conquers European art

North of the Alps, the "conquest of this new point of view" took place more slowly than in Italy. It was mainly Jan van Eyck who helped this process to break through. In addition to Jan van Eyck , Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca are particularly noteworthy here. In his manuscript "De prospectiva Pingende" (1470), the latter once again summarized the rules of perspective.

The new perspective construction method was accompanied by a completely new understanding of the world. Body and space became a geometrically calculable and constructible homogeneity, the "aggregate space" became the "system space". This led to an "objectification of the subjective" (Weibel), and subsequently to a "divine" ideal space, which could be represented on pictures.

As a result, numerous technical innovations developed, which also had a considerable influence on the production of art. In addition to oil painting, the printing press, the shift from the Ptolemy world view to the Copernican world view, as well as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were also mentioned. All this had a considerable influence on the visual worlds of the artists. However, all styles and epochs since the Renaissance had one thing in common: they used perspective.

The disappearance of the perspective from art production

With the invention of the photography, the perspective slowly disappears from the artistic images. The representation of seen reality now becomes the task of photography. Painting turned to new shores - the beginning of classical modernism and the search for abstraction gets in the focus. L'art pour l'art was born. But this is another article ;-)

After this excursion into the art-historical development of perspective, one thing seems to me above all to be worth considering: the reality of man has always been three-dimensional. For a long time pictures were "art pictures" - created by artists and a special visual challenge for the perceiving people. Meanwhile we are flooded with images. The entire digital world manifests itself in two dimensions - be it on TV, PC screen or in mobile devices. Perspective as a constructive principle is increasingly being forgotten.

More articles about perspective

• Perspective [1]: perspective drawing with vanishing point and vanishing lines
• Perspective [2]: Analysis of Duerers woodcut "The Draughtsman of the Lute"

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Philosophical Perspectives on Art

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This book presents a series of chapters devoted to two of the most fundamental topics in the philosophy of art: the distinctive character of artworks and what is involved in understanding them as art. In Part I, a wide range of questions about the nature and definition of art are considered. Can art be defined, and if so, which definitions are the most plausible? Do we make and consume art because there are evolutionary advantages to doing so? Has art completed the mission that guided its earlier historical development, and if so, what is to become of it now? Should architecture be classified as an art form? Part II turns to the interpretation and appreciation of art. What is the target and purpose of the critic's interpretation? Is interpretation primarily directed at uncovering artists' intended meanings? Can apparently contradictory interpretations of a given piece both be true? Are interpretative evaluations entailed by descriptions of a work's aesthetic and artistic characteristics? In addition to providing answers to these and other questions in aesthetics, there is consideration of the nature and content of metaphor, and the relation between the expressive qualities of a work of art and the emotions of its creator.

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Perspective Drawing 101: Learn How to Draw Perspective FAST

• Last Updated: December 11, 2023

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Struggling to make your drawings look three-dimensional? Don’t feel ashamed! Perspective drawing is something most artists struggle with when they start out.

After all, it’s natural for it to be difficult to make a two-dimensional surface look three-dimensional.

If you want to learn how to make your drawings less flat and more realistic, make sure to keep reading! A comprehensive guide on how to draw perspective has been prepared below:

What is Perspective Drawing in Art?

Linear perspective key terms you should know, one-point perspective drawing, step 1. draw the horizon line, step 2. draw the vanishing points, step 3. draw the orthogonal lines, multi-point perspective drawing, how does atmospheric perspective work, why is learning perspective drawing so important, start practicing perspective drawing today.

Perspective drawing in art is the process of creating a representative for a three-dimensional object or space on a two-dimensional surface. For this to be possible, artists use perspective techniques in order to create an illusion of depth in their artworks.

Perspective techniques can be classified into two categories: linear perspective and atmospheric perspective .

If you want to learn how to use these perspective techniques to advance your art-level . Detailed explanations and various tutorials will be given in the next couple of sections:

Overview – What is Linear Perspective?

Linear perspective is a mathematical system where artists use perspective lines in order to create depth. It was invented during the Italian Renaissance and came about under the collaboration of a team of architects and artists who wanted a more systematic way to draw a three-dimensional object onto a two-dimensional surface.

As for how it’s done, it all starts with the idea that each painting is an ‘open window’ from which a painted world can be seen.

Before moving forward, study the following key terms in order to deepen your understanding of linear perspective drawing:

• Horizon : The horizon runs across the canvas at the eye-level of the viewer. It’s a critical line in perspective drawing that decides where the sky will meet the land/water.
• Vanishing Point(s) : The vanishing point in a piece of artwork is a point on the horizon line that is furthest away from the viewer. Just like if you were to draw a train train track. The furthest distance, where the lines of the track have become almost one, is where the vanishing point should be placed on the drawing paper.
• Vantage Point : Not to be confused with vanishing points. A vantage point is the angle from which the audience views a piece of artwork.
• Ground Plane : The surface below the horizontal line. If you’re painting a landscape, it can be land or water.
• Orthogonal Lines : This term describes the parallel lines that are connected to the vanishing point of a painting. The lines create right angles, which is where the word “orthogonal” meaning “right angle” comes from.

Now that you’ve learned the key vocabulary, you can start your drawing practice !

The first type of linear perspective is one-point perspective .

One-point perspective is the simplest and most commonly used type of linear perspective, with there being only a single vanishing point.

The vanishing point for one-point perspective can be placed anywhere along the horizon line and there’s no need to worry about where to place the orthogonal lines. They will all be connected to this singular point, which makes the creation of the perspective map very simple.

To give you an example of how one-point perspective can be used for a painting, we’ve broken down the famous classical painting, “The Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci for reference:

In the image prepared above, the red line represents the horizon line — AKA where the sky meets land or the viewer’s eyeline. Right in the middle of the horizon line is a yellow point on the horizon line representing the vanishing point.

And, finally, as you can see, the orthogonal lines (drawn in blue) all radiate from this singular vanishing point, completing a single-point perspective map.

Notice, all the lines in this one-point perspective drawing follow these orthogonal lines to the center point, which provides the illusion of depth. The structures and objects in the fictitious space recede the closer they get to the vanishing point.

Two-Point Perspective Drawing

Next, we have two-point perspective . As can be guessed from the name, different from single-point perspective, two-point perspective includes two vanishing points, which makes the illusion of space a lot more realistic … and, at the same time, a lot more complicated to set up.

Most artists will probably not want to create many two-point perspective maps in their lifetime. It’s far too tiring. But, so long as you want an object in your drawing or painting to be given form, you need to understand this concept. As for why, the answer can be found in the tutorial below:

The first step in any perspective drawing is to draw the horizon line. In our reference painting, “ Paris Street; Rainy Day ” the horizon line can be found almost at the center of the composition.

Note, it happens to fall exactly at the eyeline of the foremost figure in the painting. This makes it feel like the viewer is walking down the rainy Paris streets and brings you straight to the scene.

The next step when drawing a two-point perspective map is to draw the two vanishing points on the horizon line. If you want to try drawing a two-point perspective map yourself, you can place your vanishing points anywhere you want — even outside the painting frame!

In the “Paris Streets; Rainy Day” image above, vanishing points have been clearly marked in yellow. They can be identified relatively easily because of the rendering of the building on the upper left-hand corner of the painting.

By following the edges of said building, which recedes into two directions, you can not only determine the fact that this painting is not a one-point perspective drawing, but you can also locate the vanishing points from which the edges radiate.

Here is the painting once more, this time, with straight lines representing the orthogonal lines that radiate from the two different vanishing points.

As you can see, the building in the upper left corner depends on two vanishing points to be given form whilst the street and the other buildings in the foreground still follow the main vanishing point at the center.

By the way, if you want to practice perspective on drawing paper, you can draw some vertical lines along the horizontal line and the diagonal orthogonal lines to get straight surfaces— just like the blue walls of the image above.

For two-point perspective, such vertical lines are usually placed along the orthogonal lines of the same vanishing point. This is how you get all the vertical lines on the building in the upper-left corner of the previous example.

Linear perspective is not limited to two-point or one-point perspective. There is also multi-point perspective, also called three-point perspective .

As can be assumed from the name, three-point perspective is a type of perspective that, at the very least, has a third vanishing point. Its most common use is to have vanishing points on the left and right side of the composition and then one vanishing point at the top or bottom.

If the vanishing point is at the bottom, the vantage point is downwards — making it look like a bird’s eye view of the subject. Meanwhile, if the vanishing point is set at the top, the vantage point is upwards, which makes it look like you are looking up at something.

Our reference sample for three-point perspective is “Babel Tower” by Escher. This drawing not only shows what a composition with three vanishing points looks like, but it also demonstrates how the vanishing points and horizon line can be set outside of the frame of the painting.

Overview – What Is Atmospheric Perspective?

Atmospheric perspective, sometimes called “aerial perspective”, is the process of conveying depth and distance by considering the ‘ atmospheric effects ’ that come with distance.

Linear and atmospheric perspectives cannot be said to be comparable because the theory used is different. Linear perspective relies on perspective lines and mathematical systems.

Meanwhile, atmospheric perspective uses value, colors, and focus as a way to convey depth . There’s no such thing as perspective lines, horizon lines, or dealing with a single vanishing point or multiple vanishing points.

Have a look at “The Fighting Temeraire” by J.M.W. Turner to see how atmospheric perspective is used . Here, things that are closer are clearer and brighter in color. Whilst those that are distant have less visual contrast and have a tendency to be cooler in colors.

These rules are not pulled out of thin air either. It’s a scientific fact that distance makes particles more crowded, which blurs the details of faraway objects. Also, blue color waves have a tendency to bounce around crowded particles, giving distant objects a blue hue.

All this is a result of the water, vapor, smog, etc. that naturally occur in the Earth’s atmosphere. Thus, accounting for these factors will make your art more realistic and true to nature.

If you can learn how to draw your own perspective drawings, not only will your art be more realistic, but it will also help you improve your compositions as a whole.

Perspective is, after all, one of the foundations of realism. It’s true that you can paint abstract or impressionistic paintings without learning it, however, not learning for this reason will surely cause more harm than help. After all, doing so will certainly limit your horizons.

Of course, it’s easy to say that you should learn perspective drawing, but actually learning it is another matter. For example, because perspective drawing usually starts with beginners learning about perspective lines, they have a tendency to focus solely on the structure and forget about everything else.

In this way, learning perspective should be about grasping the general concepts and gaining an understanding about why the rules work in a certain way. With this understanding, perspective should come more and more naturally to you.

If you want to step up your drawings , now is the time to start practicing perspective drawing! As advised above, learn and understand the rules slowly. Over time, with hard work and practice, you’ll find that perspective and depth in art is a lot less complicated than it looks on the surface.

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1.5: How to Compare and Contrast Art

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• Deborah Gustlin & Zoe Gustlin
• Evergreen Valley College via ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative

Comparing modern paintings and historic paintings brings an understanding of how the past influences the present. Learning the elements of art, design, and art methods will help you communicate and write with a new language to compare and contrast art. In this textbook, we will be comparing and contrasting ordinary images of horses, figures, sunflowers, and dots. Like a new language, it becomes more familiar the more the terms used in written descriptions. Looking at art is the foundation of learning how to write descriptive essays. The longer you look, the more information you begin to see, like the brush marks. Asking yourself questions about the brush marks can help you define the type of art you are looking at: Impressionism uses significant broad-brush marks with visible slabs of paint. While Renaissance artists used oil paint with almost hidden brush marks giving a life-like look to the painting. These observations will help you decide what period of art painting can belong in when you do not know the answer.

Comparing Horses

The two paintings, Relay Hunting (1.9) and Foundation Sire (1.10) were created 170 years apart yet are as realistic as photographs taken yesterday. Similar instances, the horses predominantly face away from the viewer displaying the sturdy hind legs and taut muscles. The shining sun marks their coats, reflecting highlights and emphasizing the muscle structure of the animals. Both artists realistically depict the horses causing the viewer to take a second look at the exquisite details of the horses and the surroundings.

In realistic paintings, both artists focused on detail based upon their study of horse anatomy. Rosa Bonheur, who painted the three horses in Relay Hunting (1.9), actually went to meat processing plants and studied the anatomy of the horses while she dissected the animals. Most artists study human anatomy as part of their education. Understanding the body's muscle and bone structure benefits the artists' ability to draw realistic people and animals.

1.13 Study of Horses , Leonardo

The representation of horses throughout human time began on the cave wall, Image of Horse (1.11). We see horses immortalized in bronze statues, captured on film, or drawn in Study of Horses (1.13). Painted in Blue Horses (1.14), etched in Knight, Death and the Devil (1.12), and colored. Horses have been a mode of transportation for thousands of years, and the equine image has been traditional portraiture throughout the ages. These pictures of different types of horses demonstrate they can be drawn or painted in many types of styles. The details in the etched Knight, Death, and the Devil (1.12) establishes the artist as a detail orientated person as opposed to the Blue Horses (1.14), which has a looser painting style and bolder colors.

Comparing Figures

At first glance, The Birth of Venus (1.15) and Rara Avis 19 (1.16) look completely different from each other, or are they? Let us look closer at these two figures—what is the one object in both paintings that is similar? The woman in the center! Both poses are similar, expressionless except what the viewer reads into it, and they display no movement, a very static pose with elongated legs and feet. Neither one of the artists give any weight to the body or use any type of deep perspective space. Both figures have an impossible pose, the shifting of weight over one hip. They both appear to be emerging from the water as if being born from the sea.

They are both colorful and have the impression of a background; land, sea, and trees. However, these two paintings are over 500 years apart, the Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli in 1486 and Rara Avis 19 by Jylian Gustlin in 2014. Botticelli painted in oils on canvas, and his Venus is aloof and uninterested in her surroundings. Gustlin works in acrylic and oil paints on board, using the effects of layers to achieve her distinct and intricate paintings. The figures in the landscape frequently show a moody and brooding figure, yet at the same time, depicting a sense of future. One figure set in a literal translation and the other in a modern view, yet each one escapes from reality.

Comparing Sunflowers

These two pieces of art display the gorgeous sunflower at the height of its flowering. The yellow petals open up towards the sunshine, offering seeds to passing birds. The hint of brown color on the leaves tells the viewer that the fall weather is on its way. These two art pieces are about 140 years apart, one is in paint, and the other is painted fabric. The Sunflowers (1.17) in the vase is by Vincent Van Gogh in 1887, and the sunflower quilt (1.18) is by an unknown quilter, 2004.

The two pieces have many similar components, for example, the colors of the sunflowers are yellow, brown seed pods in the centers, both pictures fill the space, and both painted. The differences are more significant because the quilted sunflowers highly contrast against the dark brown fabric; the flowers in the vase are against a pale blue background. The quilt shows flowers arranged in space not anchored to stems or in a vase, as seen in the painting.

The painting process is also different. Van Gogh painted his sunflowers on canvas with oil paints. The painted quilt fabric became the palette for the sunflowers with mostly yellows, with browns, greens, and oranges in a random array of colors for highlights, cut into individual leaves, and arranged on the background fabric. Both pieces are similar works of art created in different periods with different materials.

Comparing Dots

Dots or points are single primary forms in art. In art, dots can be one or many thousands of dots abstracted into images we may or may not recognize. The dots can be far apart or close together, different colors, monochromatic, or one color. All drawings begin with a single dot from the point of the pencil, and as the pencil moves, it becomes a continuous line of dots, thereby making the dot one of the essential elements in art.

Dots become the focal point of the art, and space in-between the dots are as crucial as the dot itself. The dot can cause tension or harmony depending on the color, size, and how close the dot is to another dot. As dots placed closer together, they start to become an object, a recognizable form.

Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) is considered the 'Princess of Polka Dots' using large distinct polka dots in her two sculptures  Flowers (1.19) and Life is the Heart of a Rainbow (1.20). They are red and white polka dots surrounding the trees or the entire room. The polka dots are distinctly circles, especially in the room, as they are far apart and only in two contrasting colors. The red wrapped trees with white polka dots are closer together but still distinct in various sizes in the high contrast. The dots are not touching, and the negative space between them is about the same size throughout.

George Seurat developed a technique of painting with tiny colored dots called Pointillism as he when he branched out from Impressionism. Pointillism relies on small dots of color that blend in the viewer's minds creating a large scene. Up close, each colored dot and brush mark are visible; however, when the viewer steps back several feet, the viewer is surprised with a lifelike painting. The large-scale piece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1.21), transformed art at the turn of the 20th century and inspired artists to work with dots.

The three paintings are all created from dots, small dots, large dots, colored dots on the canvas, on walls, suspended from the ceiling, or suspended in space. The size and color of the dot do matter and can give the viewer a completely different experience.

Art is everywhere you look, everything you wear, and art is beauty. Just look around....

The Definition of Perspective in Drawing

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Perspective is what gives a three-dimensional feeling to a flat image such as a drawing or a painting. In art, it is a system of representing the way that objects appear to get smaller and closer together the farther away they are from the viewer.

Perspective is key to almost any drawing or sketch as well as many paintings. It is one of the fundamentals that you need to understand in order to create realistic and believable scenes.

Artists known for their use of perspective include Masaccio, a Renaissance painter who developed a realistic style by being among the first to apply the rules of perspective; Johannes Vermeer, a Dutch artist whose carefully lighted interiors often make clever use of perspective; and Gustave Caillebotte, whose "Paris Street, Rainy Day" is a powerful demonstration of two-point perspective.

Key Takeaways: Perspective

• Perspective is used to represent the ways objects appear smaller as they move farther into the distance. It adds depth and dimension to flat images.

• In art, there are three types of perspective: one-point, two-point, and three-point.

• Mathematical perspective in art was developed during the Italian Renaissance during the 1400s.

What Does Perspective Look Like?

Imagine driving along a very straight open road on a grassy plain. The road, the fences, and the power-poles all diminish toward a single point far ahead of you. That's single-point perspective.

Single- or one-point perspective is the simplest method of making objects look three-dimensional. It is often used for interior views or trompe l'oeil (fool the eye) effects. Objects must be placed so that the front sides are parallel to the picture plane, with the side edges receding toward a single point.

A perfect example is Da Vinci's "Adoration of the Magi." The building in the background faces the viewer, and the stairs and the side walls get smaller as they move toward a single point in the center of the painting.

Linear Perspective

When we talk about perspective drawing, we usually mean linear perspective. Linear perspective is a geometric method of representing the apparent diminishment of scale as the distance between an object and the viewer increases. Each set of horizontal lines has its own vanishing point . For simplicity, artists usually focus on correctly rendering one, two, or three vanishing points.

The invention of linear perspective in art is generally attributed to the Florentine architect Brunelleschi. His ideas continued to be developed and used by Renaissance artists, notably Piero Della Francesca and Andrea Mantegna. The first book to include a treatise on perspective, "On Painting," was published by Leon Battista Alberti in 1436.

One-Point Perspective

In one-point perspective, the vertical lines that run across the field of view remain parallel, as their vanishing points are at "infinity." The horizontal lines, however, which are perpendicular to the viewer, vanish toward a single point at the center of the image.

If you are experimenting with perspective, you can practice one-point perspective by doing this:

• Draw a straight line across the middle of your drawing. This is your horizon line. Locate a point along this line—it may be in the center, though it does not have to be—and mark it. This is your vanishing point.
• Draw the facade of a simple building to the right of the vanishing point.
• Using a ruler, draw a soft line from the top-left corner of the building to the vanishing point. Then draw another line from the bottom-left corner to the vanishing point. These lines show how the building will get smaller as it gets farther away from the viewer.
• Locate the end of the building somewhere along the lines you have just sketched. Mark it by drawing a line parallel to the building's facade. Erase the remaining line segments that connect to the vanishing point.
• Using the same method, add other buildings to the drawing.

Two-Point Perspective

In two-point perspective, the viewer is positioned so that the objects in the drawing or painting are viewed from one corner. This creates two sets of horizontals which diminish toward vanishing points at the outer edges of the picture plane, leaving only verticals perpendicular.

It is slightly more complex, as both the front and back edges and the side edges of an object must diminish toward vanishing points. Two-point perspective is often used when drawing buildings in landscapes.

Two-point perspective uses the same method described above. The main difference is that the viewer is looking from one corner rather than head-on. For this reason, you cannot begin the drawing with the building's facade. You must first draw the line that forms the corner of the building, then use one of the vanishing points to complete the facade.

Three-Point Perspective

In three-point perspective , the viewer is looking up or down so that the verticals also converge on a vanishing point at the top or bottom of the image. This is the most complex form of perspective. Unlike in one-point and two-point perspective, none of the lines in the drawing are perpendicular to the viewer. Instead, each one is drawn in the direction of a certain vanishing point. If you were drawing a building using three-point perspective, you would need to begin with only a single point located on the building, then use the vanishing points to define each side of the structure.

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By Will Fenstermaker

June 14, 2017

There has never been a time when art critics held more power than during the second half of the twentieth century. Following the Second World War, with the relocation of the world’s artistic epicenter from Paris to New York, a different kind of war was waged in the pages of magazines across the country. As part of the larger “culture wars” of the mid-century, art critics began to take on greater influence than they’d ever held before. For a time, two critics in particular—who began as friends, and remained in the same social circles for much of their lives—set the stakes of the debates surrounding the maturation of American art that would continue for decades. The ideas about art outlined by Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg are still debated today, and the extent to which they were debated in the past has shaped entire movements of the arts. Below are ten works of criticism through which one can trace the mainstreaming of Clement Greenberg’s formalist theory, and how its dismantling led us into institutional critique and conceptual art today.

The American Action Painters

Harold Rosenberg

Harold Rosenberg, a poet who came to art through his involvement with the Artist’s Union and the WPA, was introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre as the “first American existentialist.” Soon, Rosenberg became a contributor to Sartre’s publication in France, for which he first drafted his influential essay. However, when Sartre supported Soviet aggression against Korea, Rosenberg brought his essay to Elaine de Kooning , then the editor of ARTnews , who ran “The American Action Painters” in December, 1952.

RELATED: What Did Harold Rosenberg Do? An Introduction to the Champion of “Action Painting”

Rosenberg’s essay on the emerging school of American Painters omitted particular names—because they’d have been unfamiliar to its original French audience—but it was nonetheless extraordinarily influential for the burgeoning scene of post-WWII American artists. Jackson Pollock claimed to be the influence of “action painting,” despite Rosenberg’s rumored lack of respect for the artist because Pollock wasn’t particularly well-read. Influenced by Marxist theory and French existentialism, Rosenberg conceives of a painting as an “arena,” in which the artist acts upon, wrestles, or otherwise engages with the canvas, in what ultimately amounts to an expressive record of a struggle. “What was to go on the canvas,” Rosenberg wrote, “was not a picture but an event.”

Notable Quote

Weak mysticism, the “Christian Science” side of the new movement, tends … toward easy painting—never so many unearned masterpieces! Works of this sort lack the dialectical tension of a genuine act, associated with risk and will. When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be a Success. The painter need keep himself on hand solely to collect the benefits of an endless series of strokes of luck. His gesture completes itself without arousing either an opposing movement within itself nor the desire in the artist to make the act more fully his own. Satisfied with wonders that remain safely inside the canvas, the artist accepts the permanence of the commonplace and decorates it with his own daily annihilation. The result is an apocalyptic wallpaper.

‘American-Type’ Painting

Clement Greenberg

Throughout the preceding decade, Clement Greenberg, also a former poet, had established a reputation as a leftist critic through his writings with The Partisan Review —a publication run by the John Reed Club, a New York City-centered organization affiliated with the American Communist Party—and his time as an art critic with The Nation . In 1955, The Partisan Review published Greenberg’s “‘American-Type’ Painting,” in which the critic defined the now-ubiquitous term “abstract expressionism.”

RELATED: What Did Clement Greenberg Do? A Primer on the Powerful AbEx Theorist’s Key Ideas

In contrast to Rosenberg’s conception of painting as a performative act, Greenberg’s theory, influenced by Clive Bell and T. S. Eliot, was essentially a formal one—in fact, it eventually evolved into what would be called “formalism.” Greenberg argued that the evolution of painting was one of historical determinacy—that ever since the Renaissance, pictures moved toward flatness, and the painted line moved away from representation. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso were two of the landmarks of this view. Pollock, who exhibited his drip paintings in 1951, freeing the line from figuration, was for Greenberg the pinnacle of American Modernism, the most important artist since Picasso. (Pollock’s paintings exhibited in 1954, with which he returned to semi-representational form, were regarded by Greenberg as a regression. This lead him to adopt Barnett Newman as his new poster-boy, despite the artist’s possessing vastly different ideas on the nature of painting. For one, Greenberg mostly ignored the Biblical titles of Newman’s paintings.)

Greenberg’s formalist theories were immensely influential over the subsequent decades. Artforum in particular grew into a locus for formalist discourse, which had the early effect of providing an aesthetic toolkit divorced from politic. Certain curators of the Museum of Modern Art, particularly William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and to an extent Alfred Barr are credited for steering the museum in an essentially formalist direction. Some painters, such as Frank Stella , Helen Frankenthaler , and Kenneth Noland, had even been accused of illustrating Greenberg’s theories (and those of Michael Fried, a prominent Greenbergian disciple) in attempt to embody the theory, which was restrictive in its failure to account for narrative content, figuration, identity, politics, and more. In addition, Greenberg’s theories proved well-suited for a burgeoning art market, which found connoisseurship an easy sell. (As the writer Mary McCarthy said, “You can’t hang an event on your wall.”) In fact, the dominance of the term “abstract expressionism” over “action painting,” which seemed more applicable to Pollock and Willem de Kooning than any other members of the New York School, is emblematic of the influence of formalist discourse.

The justification for the term, “abstract expressionist,” lies in the fact that most of the painters covered by it took their lead from German, Russian, or Jewish expressionism in breaking away from late Cubist abstract art. But they all started from French painting, for their fundamental sense of style from it, and still maintain some sort of continuity with it. Not least of all, they got from it their most vivid notion of an ambitious, major art, and of the general direction in which it had to go in their time.

Barbara Rose

Like many critics in the 1950s and 60s, Barbara Rose had clearly staked her allegiance to one camp or the other. She was, firmly, a formalist, and along with Fried and Rosalind Krauss is largely credited with expanding the theory beyond abstract expressionist painting. By 1965, however, Rose recognized a limitation of the theory as outlined by Greenberg—that it was reductionist and only capable of account for a certain style of painting, and not much at all in other mediums.

RELATED: The Intellectual Origins Of Minimalism

In “ABC Art,” published in Art in America where Rose was a contributing editor, Rose opens up formalism to encompass sculpture, which Greenberg was largely unable to account for. The simple idea that art moves toward flatness and abstraction leads, for Rose, into Minimalism, and “ABC Art” is often considered the first landmark essay on Minimalist art. By linking the Minimalist sculptures of artists like Donald Judd to the Russian supremacist paintings of Kasimir Malevich and readymades of Duchamp, she extends the determinist history that formalism relies on into sculpture and movements beyond abstract expressionism.

I do not agree with critic Michael Fried’s view that Duchamp, at any rate, was a failed Cubist. Rather, the inevitability of a logical evolution toward a reductive art was obvious to them already. For Malevich, the poetic Slav, this realization forced a turning inward toward an inspirational mysticism, whereas for Duchamp, the rational Frenchman, it meant a fatigue so enervating that finally the wish to paint at all was killed. Both the yearnings of Malevich’s Slavic soul and the deductions of Duchamp’s rationalist mind led both men ultimately to reject and exclude from their work many of the most cherished premises of Western art in favor of an art stripped to its bare, irreducible minimum.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Philip Leider

Despite the rhetorical tendency to suggest the social upheaval of the '60s ended with the actual decade, 1970 remained a year of unrest. And Artforum was still the locus of formalist criticism, which was proving increasingly unable to account for art that contributed to larger cultural movements, like Civil Rights, women’s liberation, anti-war protests, and more. (Tellingly, The Partisan Review , which birthed formalism, had by then distanced itself from its communist associations and, as an editorial body, was supportive of American Interventionism in Vietnam. Greenberg was a vocal hawk.) Subtitled “Art and Politics in Nevada, Berkeley, San Francisco, and Utah,” the editor’s note to the September 1970 issue of Artforum , written by Philip Leider, ostensibly recounts a road trip undertaken with Richard Serra and Abbie Hoffman to see Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in the Nevada desert.

RELATED: A City of Art in the Desert: Behind Michael Heizer’s Monumental Visions for Nevada

However, the essay is also an account of an onsetting disillusion with formalism, which Leider found left him woefully unequipped to process the protests that had erupted surrounding an exhibition of prints by Paul Wunderlich at the Phoenix Gallery in Berkeley. Wunderlich’s depictions of nude women were shown concurrently to an exhibition of drawings sold to raise money for Vietnamese orphans. The juxtaposition of a canonical, patriarchal form of representation and liberal posturing, to which the protestors objected, showcased the limitations of a methodology that placed the aesthetic elements of a picture plane far above the actual world in which it existed. Less than a year later, Leider stepped down as editor-in-chief and Artforum began to lose its emphasis on late Modernism.

I thought the women were probably with me—if they were, I was with them. I thought the women were picketing the show because it was reactionary art. To the women, [Piet] Mondrian must be a great revolutionary artist. Abstract art broke all of those chains thirty years ago! What is a Movement gallery showing dumb stuff like this for? But if it were just a matter of reactionary art , why would the women picket it? Why not? Women care as much about art as men do—maybe more. The question is, why weren’t the men right there with them?

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

Linda Nochlin

While Artforum , in its early history, had established a reputation as a generator for formalist theory, ARTnews had followed a decidedly more Rosenberg-ian course, emphasizing art as a practice for investigating the world. The January 1971 issue of the magazine was dedicated to “Women’s Liberation, Woman Artists, and Art History” and included an iconoclastic essay by Linda Nochlin titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”

RELATED: An Introduction to Feminist Art

Nochlin notes that it’s tempting to answer the question “why have there been no great women artists?” by listing examples of those overlooked by critical and institutional organizations (a labor that Nochlin admits has great merit). However, she notes, “by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications,” namely that women are intrinsically less capable of achieving artistic merit than men. Instead, Nochlin’s essay functions as a critique of art institutions, beginning with European salons, which were structured in such a way as to deter women from rising to the highest echelons. Nochlin’s essay is considered the beginning of modern feminist art history and a textbook example of institutional critique.

There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo or Rembrandt, Delacroix or Cézanne, Picasso or Matisse, or even in very recent times, for de Kooning or Warhol, any more than there are black American equivalents for the same. If there actually were large numbers of “hidden” great women artists, or if there really should be different standards for women’s art as opposed to men’s—and one can’t have it both ways—then what are feminists fighting for? If women have in fact achieved the same status as men in the arts, then the status quo is fine as it is. But in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education.

Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief

Thomas McEvilley

One of the many extrapolations of Nochlin’s essay is that contemporary museum institutions continue to reflect the gendered and racist biases of preceding centuries by reinforcing the supremacy of specific master artists. In a 1984 Artforum review, Thomas McEvilley, a classicist new to the world of contemporary art, made the case that the Museum of Modern Art in New York served as an exclusionary temple to certain high-minded Modernists—namely, Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock—who, in fact, took many of their innovations from native cultures.

RELATED: MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting From a “Bogus” Painting

In 1984, MoMA organized a blockbuster exhibition. Curated by William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, both of whom were avowed formalists, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” collected works by European painters like Paul Gaugin and Picasso with cultural artifacts from Zaire, arctic communities, and elsewhere. McEvilley takes aim at the “the absolutist view of formalist Modernism” in which MoMA is rooted. He argues that the removal tribal artifacts from their contexts (for example, many were ritual items intended for ceremonies, not display) and placement of them, unattributed, near works by European artists, censors the cultural contributions of non-Western civilizations in deference to an idealized European genius.

The fact that the primitive “looks like” the Modern is interpreted as validating the Modern by showing that its values are universal, while at the same time projecting it—and with it MoMA—into the future as a permanent canon. A counter view is possible: that primitivism on the contrary invalidates Modernism by showing it to be derivative and subject to external causation. At one level this show undertakes precisely to coopt that question by answering it before it has really been asked, and by burying it under a mass of information.

Please Wait By the Coatroom

Not content to let MoMA and the last vestiges of formalism off the hook yet, John Yau wrote in 1988 an essay on Wifredo Lam, a Cuban painter who lived and worked in Paris among Picasso, Matisse, Georges Braque, and others. Noting Lam’s many influences—his Afro-Cuban mother, Chinese father, and Yoruba godmother—Yau laments the placement of Lam’s The Jungle near the coatroom in the Museum of Modern Art, as opposed to within the Modernist galleries several floors above. The painting was accompanied by a brief entry written by former curator William Rubin, who, Yau argues, adopted Greenberg’s theories because they endowed him with “a connoisseur’s lens with which one can scan all art.”

RELATED: From Cuba With Love: Artist Bill Claps on the Island’s DIY Art Scene

Here, as with with McEvilley’s essay, Yau illustrates how formalism, as adapted by museum institutions, became a (perhaps unintentional) method for reinforcing the exclusionary framework that Nochlin argued excluded women and black artists for centuries.

Rubin sees in Lam only what is in his own eyes: colorless or white artists. For Lam to have achieved the status of unique individual, he would have had to successfully adapt to the conditions of imprisonment (the aesthetic standards of a fixed tradition) Rubin and others both construct and watch over. To enter this prison, which takes the alluring form of museums, art history textbooks, galleries, and magazines, an individual must suppress his cultural differences and become a colorless ghost. The bind every hybrid American artist finds themselves in is this: should they try and deal with the constantly changing polymorphous conditions effecting identity, tradition, and reality? Or should they assimilate into the mainstream art world by focusing on approved-of aesthetic issues? Lam’s response to this bind sets an important precedent. Instead of assimilating, Lam infiltrates the syntactical rules of “the exploiters” with his own specific language. He becomes, as he says, “a Trojan horse.”

Black Culture and Postmodernism

Cornel West

The opening up of cultural discourse did not mean that it immediately made room for voices of all dimensions. Cornel West notes as much in his 1989 essay “Black Culture and Postmodernism,” in which he argues that postmodernism, much like Modernism before it, remains primarily ahistorical, which makes it difficult for “oppressed peoples to exercise their opposition to hierarchies of power.” West’s position is that the proliferation of theory and criticism that accompanied the rise of postmodernism provided mechanisms by which black culture could “be conversant with and, to a degree, participants in the debate.” Without their voices, postmodernism would remain yet another exclusionary movements.

RELATED: Kerry James Marshall on Painting Blackness as a Noun Vs. Verb

As the consumption cycle of advanced multinational corporate capitalism was sped up in order to sustain the production of luxury goods, cultural production became more and more mass-commodity production. The stress here is not simply on the new and fashionable but also on the exotic and primitive. Black cultural products have historically served as a major source for European and Euro-American exotic interests—interests that issue from a healthy critique of the mechanistic, puritanical, utilitarian, and productivity aspects of modern life.

Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power

Anna C. Chave

In recent years, formalist analysis has been deployed as a single tool within a more varied approach to art. Its methodology—that of analyzing a picture as an isolated phenomena—remains prevalent, and has its uses. Yet, many of the works and movements that rose to prominence under formalist critics and curators, in no small part because of their institutional acceptance, have since become part of the rearguard rather than the vanguard.

In a 1990 essay for Arts Magazine , Anna Chave analyzes how Minimalist sculpture possesses a “domineering, sometimes brutal rhetoric” that was aligned with “both the American military in Vietnam, and the police at home in the streets and on university campuses across the country.” In particular, Chave is concerned with the way Minimalist sculptures define themselves through a process of negation. Of particular relevance to Chave’s argument are the massive steel sculptures by Minimalist artist Richard Serra.

Tilted Arc was installed in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan in 1981. Chave describes the work as a “mammoth, perilously tilted steel arc [that] formed a divisive barrier too tall to see over, and a protracted trip to walk around.” She writes, “it is more often the case with Serra that his work doesn’t simply exemplify aggression or domination, but acts it out.” Tilted Arc was so controversial upon its erecting that the General Services Administration, which commissioned the work, held hearings in response to petitions demanding the work be removed. Worth quoting at length, Chave writes:

A predictable defense of Serra’s work was mounted by critics, curators, dealers, collectors, and some fellow artists…. The principle arguments mustered on Serra’s behalf were old ones concerning the nature and function of the avant-garde…. What Rubin and Serra’s other supporters declined to ask is whether the sculptor really is, in the most meaningful sense of the term, an avant-garde artist. Being avant-garde implies being ahead of, outside, or against the dominant culture; proffering a vision that implicitly stands (at least when it is conceived) as a critique of entrenched forms and structures…. But Serra’s work is securely embedded within the system: when the brouhaha over Arc was at its height, he was enjoying a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art…. [The defense’s] arguments locate Serra not with the vanguard but with the standing army or “status quo.” … More thoughtful, sensible, and eloquent testimony at the hearing came instead from some of the uncouth:

My name is Danny Katz and I work in this building as a clerk. My friend Vito told me this morning that I am a philistine. Despite that I am getting up to speak…. I don’t think this issue should be elevated into a dispute between the forces of ignorance and art, or art versus government. I really blame government less because it has long ago outgrown its human dimension. But from the artists I expected a lot more. I didn’t expect to hear them rely on the tired and dangerous reasoning that the government has made a deal, so let the rabble live with the steel because it’s a deal. That kind of mentality leads to wars. We had a deal with Vietnam. I didn’t expect to hear the arrogant position that art justifies interference with the simple joys of human activity in a plaza. It’s not a great plaza by international standards, but it is a small refuge and place of revival for people who ride to work in steel containers, work in sealed rooms, and breathe recirculated air all day. Is the purpose of art in public places to seal off a route of escape, to stress the absence of joy and hope? I can’t believe this was the artistic intention, yet to my sadness this for me has become the dominant effect of the work, and it’s all the fault of its position and location. I can accept anything in art, but I can’t accept physical assault and complete destruction of pathetic human activity. No work of art created with a contempt for ordinary humanity and without respect for the common element of human experience can be great. It will always lack dimension.

The terms Katz associated with Serra’s project include arrogance and contempt, assault, and destruction; he saw the Minimalist idiom, in other words, as continuous with the master discourse of our imperious and violent technocracy.

The End of Art

Arthur Danto

Like Greenberg, Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation . However, Danto was overtly critical of Greenberg’s ideology and the influence he wielded over Modern and contemporary art. Nor was he a follower of Harold Rosenberg, though they shared influences, among them the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Danto’s chief contribution to contemporary art was his advancing of Pop Artists, particularly Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein .

In “The End of Art” Danto argues that society at large determines and accepts art, which no longer progresses linearly, categorized by movements. Instead, viewers each possess a theory or two, which they use to interpret works, and art institutions are largely tasked with developing, testing, and modifying various interpretive methods. In this way, art differs little from philosophy. After decades of infighting regarding the proper way to interpret works of art, Danto essentially sanctioned each approach and the institutions that gave rise to them. He came to call this “pluralism.”

RELATED: What Was the Pictures Generation?

Similarly, in “Painting, Politics, and Post-Historical Art,” Danto makes the case for an armistice between formalism and the various theories that arose in opposition, noting that postmodern critics like Douglas Crimp in the 1980s, who positioned themselves against formalism, nonetheless adopted the same constrictive air, minus the revolutionary beginnings.

Modernist critical practice was out of phase with what was happening in the art world itself in the late 60s and through the 1970s. It remained the basis for most critical practice, especially on the part of the curatoriat, and the art-history professoriat as well, to the degree that it descended to criticism. It became the language of the museum panel, the catalog essay, the article in the art periodical. It was a daunting paradigm, and it was the counterpart in discourse to the “broadening of taste” which reduced art of all cultures and times to its formalist skeleton, and thus, as I phrased it, transformed every museum into a Museum of Modern Art, whatever that museum’s contents. It was the stable of the docent’s gallery talk and the art appreciation course—and it was replaced, not totally but massively, by the postmodernist discourse that was imported from Paris in the late 70s, in the texts of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Lacan, and of the French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. That is the discourse [Douglas] Crimp internalizes, and it came to be lingua artspeak everywhere. Like modernist discourse, it applied to everything, so that there was room for deconstructive and “archeological” discussion of art of every period.

Editor’s Note: This list was drawn in part from a 2014 seminar taught by Debra Bricker Balken in the MFA program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts titled Critical Strategies: Late Modernism/Postmodernism. Additional sources can be found here , here , here (paywall), and here . Also relevant are reviews of the 2008 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976,” notably those by Roberta Smith , Peter Schjeldahl , and Martha Schwendener .

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The 10 Essays That Changed Art Criticism Forever

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“Without Art Mankind Could Not Exist”: Leo Tolstoy’s Essay What is Art

In his essay “What is Art?” Leo Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, defines art as a way to communicate emotion with the ultimate goal of uniting humanity.

How can we define art? What is authentic art and what is good art? Leo Tolstoy answered these questions in “What is Art?” (1897), his most comprehensive essay on the theory of art. Tolstoy’s theory has a lot of charming aspects. He believes that art is a means of communicating emotion, with the aim of promoting mutual understanding. By gaining awareness of each other’s feelings we can successfully practice empathy and ultimately unite to further mankind’s collective well-being. 

Furthermore, Tolstoy firmly denies that pleasure is art’s sole purpose. Instead, he supports a moral-based art able to appeal to everyone and not just the privileged few. Although he takes a clear stance in favor of Christianity as a valid foundation for morality, his definition of religious perception is flexible. As a result, it is possible to easily replace it with all sorts of different ideological schemes.

Personally, I do not approach Tolstoy’s theory as a set of laws for understanding art. More than anything, “What is art?” is a piece of art itself. A work about the meaning of art and a fertile foundation on which truly beautiful ideas can flourish.

Most of the paintings used for this article were drawn by realist painter Ilya Repin. The Russian painter created a series of portraits of Tolstoy, which were exhibited together at the 2019 exhibition “Repin: The Myth of Tolstoy” at the State Museum L.N. Tolstoy. More information regarding the relationship between Tolstoy and Repin can be found in this article . 

Who was Tolstoy?

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Leo Tolstoy ( Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy) was born in 1828 in his family estate of Yasnaya Polyana, some 200km from Moscow. His family belonged in the Russian aristocracy and thus Leo inherited the title of count. In 1851 he joined the tsarist army to pay off his accumulated debt but quickly regretted this decision. Eventually, he left the army right after the end of the Crimean War in 1856. 

After traveling Europe and witnessing the suffering and cruelty of the world, Tolstoy was transformed. From a privileged aristocrat, he became a Christian anarchist arguing against the State and propagating non-violence. This was the doctrine that inspired Gandhi and was expressed as non-resistance to evil. This means that evil cannot be fought with evil means and one should neither accept nor resist it.  

Tolstoy’s writing made him famous around the world and he is justly considered among the four giants of Russian Literature next to Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev. His most famous novels are War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877). However, he also wrote multiple philosophical and theological texts as well as theatrical plays and short stories. Upon completing his masterpiece Anna Karenina , Tolstoy fell into a state of insufferable existential despair.

Charmed by the faith of the common people, he turned to Christianity. Eventually, he dismissed the Russian Church and every other Church as corrupted and looked for his own answers. His theological explorations led to the formulation of his own version of Christianity, which deeply influenced his social vision.  He died in 1910 at the age of 82 after suffering from pneumonia.

Art Based On Beauty And Taste 

Tolstoy wrote “What is art?” in 1897. There, he laid down his opinions on several art-related issues. Throughout this essay , he remains confident that he is the first to provide an exact definition for art:

“…however strange it may seem to say so, in spite of the mountains of books written about art, no exact definition of art has been constructed. And the reason of this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.”  

So, what is art for Tolstoy? Before answering the question, the Russian novelist seeks a proper basis for his definition. Examining works of other philosophers and artists, he notices that they usually assume that beauty is art’s foundation. For them beauty is either that which provides a certain kind of pleasure or that which is perfect according to objective, universal laws.

Tolstoy thinks that both cases lead to subjective definitions of beauty and in turn to subjective definitions of art. Those who realize the impossibility of objectively defining beauty, turn to a study of taste asking why a thing pleases. Again, Tolstoy sees no point in this, as taste is also subjective. There is no way of explaining why one thing pleases someone but displeases someone else, he concludes. 

Theories that Justify the Canon

Theories of art based on beauty or taste inescapably include only that type of art that appeals to certain people:

“First acknowledging a certain set of productions to be art (because they please us) and then framing such a theory of art that all those productions which please a certain circle of people should fit into it.”

These theories are made to justify the existing art canon which covers anything from Greek art to Shakespeare and Beethoven. In reality, the canon is nothing more than the artworks appreciated by the upper classes. To justify new productions that please the elites, new theories that expand and reaffirm the canon are constantly created: 

“No matter what insanities appear in art, when once they find acceptance among the upper classes of our society, a theory is quickly invented to explain and sanction them; just as if there had never been periods in history when certain special circles of people recognized and approved false, deformed, and insensate art which subsequently left no trace and has been utterly forgotten.”  

The true definition of art, according to Tolstoy, should be based on moral principles. Before anything, we need to question if a work of art is moral. If it is moral, then it is good art. If it is not moral, it is bad. This rationale leads Tolstoy to a very bizarre idea. At one point in his essay, he states that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and his own War and Peace are immoral and therefore bad art. But what does Tolstoy exactly mean when he says that something is good or bad art? And what is the nature of the morality he uses for his artistic judgments?

What is Art?

Art is a means of communicating feelings the same way words transmit thoughts. In art, someone transmits a feeling and “infects” others with what he/she feels. Tolstoy encapsulates his definition of art in the following passages:

“To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hand on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”

In its essence, art is a means of union among men brought together by commonly experienced feelings. It facilitates access to the psychology of others fostering empathy and understanding by tearing down the walls of the Subject. This function of art is not only useful but also necessary for the progress and wellbeing of humanity.

The innumerable feelings experienced by humans both in past and present are available to us only through art. The loss of such a unique ability would be a catastrophe. “Men would be like beasts”, says Tolstoy, and even goes as far as to claim that without art, mankind could not exist. This is a bold declaration, which recalls the Nietzschean aphorism that human existence is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Art in the Extended and Limited Sense of the Word

Tolstoy’s definition expands to almost every aspect of human activity way beyond the fine arts. Even a boy telling the story of how he met a wolf can be art. That is, however, only if the boy succeeds in making the listeners feel the fear and anguish of the encounter. Works of art are everywhere, according to this view. Cradlesong, jest, mimicry, house ornamentation, dress and utensils, even triumphal processions are all works of art. 

This is, in my view, the strongest point of Tolstoy’s theory. Namely, that it considers almost the totality of human activity as art. However, there is a distinction between this expanded art, and art in the limited sense of the word. The latter corresponds to the fine arts and is the area that Tolstoy investigates further in his essay.  A weak point of the theory is that it never examines the act of creation and art that is not shared with others. 

Real and Counterfeit Art

The distinction between real and counterfeit, good and bad art is Tolstoy’s contribution to the field of art criticism. Despite its many weaknesses, this system offers an interesting alternative to judging and appreciating art.

Tolstoy names real art (i.e. authentic, true to itself) the one resulting from an honest, internal need for expression. The product of this internal urge becomes a real work of art, if it successfully evokes feelings to other people. In this process, the receiver of the artistic impression becomes so united with the artist’s experience, that he/she feels like the artwork is his/her own. Therefore, real art removes the barrier between Subject and Object, and between receiver and sender of an artistic impression. In addition, it removes the barrier between the receivers who experience unity through a common feeling.

“In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.” Furthermore, a work that does not evoke feelings and spiritual union with others is counterfeit art. No matter how poetical, realistic, effectful, or interesting it is, it must meet these conditions to succeed. Otherwise it is just a counterfeit posing as real art.  

Emotional Infectiousness

Emotional infectiousness is a necessary quality of a work of art. The degree of infectiousness is not always the same but varies according to three conditions:

• The individuality of the feeling transmitted: the more specific to a person the feeling, the more successful the artwork.
• The clearness of the feeling transmitted: the clearness of expression assists the transition of feelings and increases the pleasure derived from art.
• The sincerity of the artist: the force with which the artist feels the emotion he/she transmits through his/her art. 

Out of all three, sincerity is the most important. Without it, the other two conditions cannot exist. Worth noting is that Tolstoy finds sincerity almost always present in “peasant art” but almost always absent in “upper-class art”. If a work lacks even one of the three qualities, it is counterfeit art. In contrast, it is real if it possesses all three. In that case, it only remains to judge whether this real artwork is good or bad, more or less successful. The success of an artwork is based firstly on the degree of its infectiousness. The more infectious the artwork, the better.  

The Religious Perception of Art

Tolstoy believes that art is a means of progress towards perfection. With time, art evolves rendering accessible the experience of humanity for humanity’s sake. This is a process of moral realization and results in society becoming kinder and more compassionate. A genuinely good artwork ought to make accessible these good feelings that move humanity closer to its moral completion. Within this framework, a good work of art must also be moral. 

But how can we judge what feelings are morally good? Tolstoy’s answer lies in what he calls “the religious perception of the age”. This is defined as the understanding of the meaning of life as conceived by a group of people. This understanding is the moral compass of a society and always points towards certain values. For Tolstoy, the religious perception of his time is found in Christianity. As a result, all good art must carry the foundational message of this religion understood as brotherhood among all people. This union of man aiming at his collective well-being, argues Tolstoy, must be revered as the highest value of all. 

Although it relates to religion, religious perception is not the same with religious cult. In fact, the definition of religious perception is so wide, that it describes ideology in general. To this interpretation leads Tolstoy’s view that, even if a society recognizes no religion, it always has a religious morality. This can be compared with the direction of a flowing river:

If the river flows at all, it must have a direction. If a society lives, there must be a religious perception indicating the direction in which, more or less consciously, all its members tend.

It is safe to say that more than a century after Tolstoy’s death, “What is Art?” retains its appeal. We should not easily dismiss the idea that (good) art communicates feelings and promotes unity through universal understanding. This is especially the case in our time where many question art’s importance and see it as a source of confusion and division. 

• Tolstoy, L.N. 1902. What is Art? In the Novels and Other Works of Lyof N. Tolstoy . translated by Aline Delano. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. pp. 328-527. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43409
• Jahn, G.R. 1975. ‘The Aesthetic Theory of Leo Tolstoy’s What Is Art?’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 34, No. 1. pp. 59-65. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/428645
• Morson, G.S. 2019. ‘Leo Tolstoy’. Encyclopædia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leo-Tolstoy

Theodor Adorno on the Essay: An Antidote to Modernity

By Antonis Chaliakopoulos MSc Museum Studies, BA History & Archaeology Antonis is an archaeologist with a passion for museums and heritage and a keen interest in aesthetics and the reception of classical art. He holds an MSc in Museum Studies from the University of Glasgow and a BA in History and Archaeology from the University of Athens (NKUA) where he is currently working on his PhD.

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Timeline of Ancient Greek Art & Sculpture

Essay on Art

500 words essay on art.

Each morning we see the sunshine outside and relax while some draw it to feel relaxed. Thus, you see that art is everywhere and anywhere if we look closely. In other words, everything in life is artwork. The essay on art will help us go through the importance of art and its meaning for a better understanding.

What is Art?

For as long as humanity has existed, art has been part of our lives. For many years, people have been creating and enjoying art.  It expresses emotions or expression of life. It is one such creation that enables interpretation of any kind.

It is a skill that applies to music, painting, poetry, dance and more. Moreover, nature is no less than art. For instance, if nature creates something unique, it is also art. Artists use their artwork for passing along their feelings.

Thus, art and artists bring value to society and have been doing so throughout history. Art gives us an innovative way to view the world or society around us. Most important thing is that it lets us interpret it on our own individual experiences and associations.

Art is similar to live which has many definitions and examples. What is constant is that art is not perfect or does not revolve around perfection. It is something that continues growing and developing to express emotions, thoughts and human capacities.

Importance of Art

Art comes in many different forms which include audios, visuals and more. Audios comprise songs, music, poems and more whereas visuals include painting, photography, movies and more.

You will notice that we consume a lot of audio art in the form of music, songs and more. It is because they help us to relax our mind. Moreover, it also has the ability to change our mood and brighten it up.

After that, it also motivates us and strengthens our emotions. Poetries are audio arts that help the author express their feelings in writings. We also have music that requires musical instruments to create a piece of art.

Other than that, visual arts help artists communicate with the viewer. It also allows the viewer to interpret the art in their own way. Thus, it invokes a variety of emotions among us. Thus, you see how essential art is for humankind.

Without art, the world would be a dull place. Take the recent pandemic, for example, it was not the sports or news which kept us entertained but the artists. Their work of arts in the form of shows, songs, music and more added meaning to our boring lives.

Therefore, art adds happiness and colours to our lives and save us from the boring monotony of daily life.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Art

All in all, art is universal and can be found everywhere. It is not only for people who exercise work art but for those who consume it. If there were no art, we wouldn’t have been able to see the beauty in things. In other words, art helps us feel relaxed and forget about our problems.

FAQ of Essay on Art

Question 1: How can art help us?

Answer 1: Art can help us in a lot of ways. It can stimulate the release of dopamine in your bodies. This will in turn lower the feelings of depression and increase the feeling of confidence. Moreover, it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Question 2: What is the importance of art?

Answer 2: Art is essential as it covers all the developmental domains in child development. Moreover, it helps in physical development and enhancing gross and motor skills. For example, playing with dough can fine-tune your muscle control in your fingers.

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Art Essay Examples

Art Essay Examples to Get You Inspired - Top 10 Samples

Published on: May 4, 2023

Last updated on: Jan 30, 2024

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Are you struggling to come up with ideas for your art essay? Or are you looking for examples to help guide you in the right direction? 

Look no further, as we have got you covered!

In this blog, we provide a range of art writing examples that cover different art forms, time periods, and themes. Whether you're interested in the classics or contemporary art, we have something for everyone. These examples offer insight into how to structure your essay, analyze art pieces, and write compelling arguments.

So, let's explore our collection of art essay examples and take the first step toward becoming a better art writer!

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Good Art Essay Examples

In the following section, we will examine a selection of art essay examples that are inspiring for various academic levels.

College Art Essay Examples

Let’s take a look at college art essay examples below:  

The Intersection of Art and Politics: An Analysis of Picasso's Guernica

The Role of Nature in American Art: A Comparative Study

University Art Essay Examples

University-level art essay assignments often differ in length and complexity. Here are two examples:

Gender and Identity in Contemporary Art: A Comparative Study

Art and Activism: The Role of Street Art in Political Movements

A Level Art Essay Examples

Below are some art paper examples A level. Check out: 

The Use Of Color In Wassily Kandinsky's Composition Viii

The Influence of African Art on Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'avignon

A Level Fine Art Essay Examples

If you're a student of fine arts, these A-level fine arts examples can serve as inspiration for your own work.

The Use Of Texture In Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night

Exploring Identity Through Portraiture: A Comparative Study

Art Essay Examples IELTS 

The Impact of Art on Mental Health

The Effects of Technology on Art And Creativity

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AP Art Essay Examples

A Comparison of Neoclassical and Romantic Art

An Examination Of The Effects Of Globalization On Contemporary Art

Types of Art Essay with Examples

Art essays can be categorized into different types. Let's take a brief look at these types with examples:

Art Criticism Essay : A critical essay analyzing and evaluating an artwork, its elements, and its meaning.

The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali: A Critical Analysis

Art History Essay: A comprehensive essay that examines the historical context, development, and significance of an artwork or art movement.

The Renaissance: A Rebirth of Artistic Expression

Exhibition Review: A review of an art exhibition that evaluates the quality and significance of the artwork on display.

A Review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Exhibition

Contemporary Art Essay: An essay that explores and analyzes contemporary art and its cultural and social context.

The Intersection of Technology and Art in Contemporary Society

Modern Art Essay: An essay that examines modern art and its significance in the development of modernism.

Cubism and its Influence on Modern Art [insert pdf]

Art Theory Essay: An essay that analyzes and critiques various theories and approaches to art.

Feminist Art Theory: A Critical Analysis of its Impact on Contemporary Art [insert pdf]

Additional Art Essay Example

Let’s take a brief look at some added art essay samples:

Artwork Essay Example

Artist Essay Example

Advanced Higher Art Essay Example

Common Art Essay Prompts

Here are some common art essay topics that you may encounter during your coursework:

• Describe a piece of artwork that has inspired you.
• A comparative analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Michelangelo's David.
• Analyze the cultural significance of a particular art movement.
• Discuss the relationship between art and politics.
• Compare and contrast two works of art from different time periods or cultures.
• The representation of identity in art
• The Evolution of Artists' Paintings:
• From Traditional to Contemporary Art
• The representation of identity in Frida Kahlo's self-portraits.
• The significance of oil on canvas in the history of art.
• The significance of the Mona Lisa in the Italian Renaissance

Art Essay Topics IELTS

Here are some art essay topics for IELTS students. Take a look: 

• The value of art education.
• The role of museums in preserving art and culture.
• The impact of globalization on contemporary art.
• The influence of technology on art and artists.
• The significance of public art in urban environments.

Tips For Writing a Successful Art Essay

Here are some tips for writing a stand-out art essay:

• Develop a clear thesis statement that guides your essay: Your thesis statement should clearly and concisely state the main argument of your essay.
• Conduct thorough research and analysis of the artwork you are writing about : This includes examining the visual elements of the artwork, researching the artist, and considering the historical significance.
• Use formal and precise language to discuss the artwork: Avoid using colloquial language and instead focus on using formal language to describe the artwork.
• Include specific examples from the artwork to support your arguments: Use specific details from the artwork to back up your analysis.
• Avoid personal bias and subjective language: Your essay should be objective and avoid using personal opinions or subjective language.
• Consider the historical and cultural context of the artwork: Analyze the artwork in the context of the time period and cultural context in which they were created.
• Edit and proofread your essay carefully before submitting it: Ensure your essay is well-organized, coherent, and free of grammatical errors and typos.
• Use proper citation format when referencing sources: Follow the appropriate citation style guidelines and give credit to all sources used in your essay.
• Be concise and focused in your writing: Stick to your main thesis statement and avoid going off-topic or including irrelevant information.
• Read your essay aloud to ensure clarity and coherence: Reading your essay out loud can help you identify inconsistencies or any other mistakes.

The Bottom Line!

We hope that the art essay examples we've explored have provided you with inspiration for your own essay. Art offers endless possibilities for analysis, and your essay is a chance to showcase your unique opinions.

Use these examples as a guide to craft an essay that reflects your personality while demonstrating your knowledge of the subject.

Short on time? Let CollegeEssay.org help you! All you have to do is to ask our experts, " write college essay for me " and they'll help you secure top grades in college.

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Take the first step towards excellence in your art studies with our AI essay writer !

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Perspective in fine art

Drake helped rescue an art theme park. It should belong to the world.

Luna luna was a 1987 experiment in fun. it’s now a valuable period piece..

LOS ANGELES — As you would expect at an amusement park, there is a cacophony of noise and music at Luna Luna , a 1987 carnival of art that has been partially revived in an old warehouse on the gritty edge of the city’s downtown arts district. Inside a brightly painted pavilion designed by David Hockney , the Berlin Philharmonic is playing a Strauss waltz, while nearby Philip Glass is wafting through the cavernous interior space. There are snippets of Beethoven in the air, and a song by Miles Davis emanates from a Ferris wheel covered in designs by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The Style section

The waltzes make the darkened space feel as if it is spinning in a circle, while the Philip Glass suggests motion constantly rising yet never ascending. Everything at Luna Luna, billed as “the world’s first art amusement park,” is magical, everything is fake, it’s a bit tawdry and shabby but it twinkles, just like the circus, miniature golf, fun fairs on a summer’s night and Las Vegas.

The original Luna Luna was created by André Heller — an Austrian artist, poet and impresario born in 1947 — who enlisted more than 30 artists, including at least a dozen marquee names, to contribute rides, attractions, installations and pavilions to an outdoor carnival staged in Hamburg just before the end of the Cold War. It was a success with audiences, but it took place mostly off the critical radar. Despite talk of restaging it in Vienna and San Diego’s Balboa Park, when the debut summer in Germany was over, Luna Luna was packed away and eventually forgotten.

Stored for decades in shipping containers left moldering in Texas, Luna Luna was purchased and partially restored by an entrepreneurial team that includes the mega-rich rapper Drake . Of the some 30 original attractions created by artists, 17 have been refurbished, and there is hope that more of them can be added to the spectacle for later iterations. It’s expensive: Tickets run close to $50 for peak hours and as much as $85 if you want the VIP “Moon Pass,” which allows admission to Salvador Dalí’s mirrored dome structure, a glass maze decorated by Roy Lichtenstein and the Hockney folly.

None of the rides — including Keith Haring ’s painted carousel, Kenny Scharf’s flying chairs and the Basquiat Ferris wheel — are open to ride as they were in 1987, alas. Still, the whole thing exudes an energy of genuine fun and naughtiness that is a rarity in the art world, and the larger cultural sector, too. It’s also rare to see a collaborative project in which dozens of artists contributed to a larger, atmospheric whole without any one creator being the star of the show.

“André gave everyone a lot of freedom in terms of what subjects to pursue,” says Lumi Tan , the curatorial director of the revival project. The artists who participated not only spanned a wide age range, but also came from different countries, cultures and political contexts. Sonia Delaunay (whose brightly colored abstract entrance gate is included in the current exhibition) and Erté (who designed a theater facade not on view) were both born in the 19th century. Other artists, like Joseph Beuys, who scribbled out a quasi-Marxist manifesto, and Dalí, had been born early enough in the 20th century to know the full enormity of Nazism, fascism and the Second World War. Others, like Haring, had lived their whole lives to that point during the Cold War and were facing the excruciating carnage of AIDS, to which he succumbed in 1990 .

Despite that range of backgrounds, there is a common sense of desperate fun underlying the different projects. Although the Cold War would soon be over, in 1987 it seemed a permanent affliction. The German and Austrian artists were also grappling with entrenched amnesia when it came to social complicity in the genocide and destruction of the Hitler years. American culture, saturated with hollow nostalgia, consumerism and the militarism of the Reagan administration, seemed a dead end for Europeans looking for an alternative to the political malaise of the late 1980s.

So, why not throw a party, a manic, crazy, dreamlike flight from reality into the pleasures of the body, transgression and forgetting? The Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin , whose works began circulating in the West in the 1960s, offered a theory of the carnivalesque as a mode of human experience, with the power to subvert entrenched political, social and religious hierarchies (at least temporarily). And the aesthetic of the circus — captivating, grotesque and delightfully retro — had long precedent in the arts, as well, from Alexander Calder’s miniature circus models to the life-as-circus absurdism of the films of Federico Fellini.

Of course, this was escapism, and during times of war, plague or political tyranny escapism has a different ethical value and purpose than it does as a merely reflexive response to the ordinary vicissitudes of life. The value of Luna Luna today isn’t so much in the art on display, which is often mere decoration on the outside of conventional circus equipment. Rather, the resuscitated amusement park is a period piece, capturing the spirit and emotions of a time when artists still believed in the idea of revolution. It was a sad, nervous, fraught age, in which apocalypse felt imminent yet avoidable, as opposed to our current, nervous, fraught age, in which the march to apocalypse feels incremental and inevitable.

The revolution inherent in Luna Luna was both physical — rides that turn, wheels that rotate — and ideological. Among Heller’s contributions to his amusement park was a marriage booth, in which “anyone and everyone can marry what and whom they want.” Dalí's Dalí Dome is an enclosure full of mirrors, replicating and fracturing reality into multiple perspectives. At another booth, dubbed the Palace of the Winds, classical music was parodied with a chorus of live flatulence.

It is endearing, and it is silly, and of course not much was really revolutionized. Artists like Nam June Paik had been working with technology and video for decades, and Paik’s 1984 televised extravaganza “Good Morning, Mr. Orwell” offered up an international circuslike entertainment across three continents. But for the artists of Luna Luna, the summit of technology is some old-fashioned animatronic displays. Even the progress of sexual and bodily liberation is now being turned back in democratic and autocratic states alike. Much of the work commissioned by Heller would look naive and shabby today, more like the sets and costumes for a high school musical than the sort of thing that is marketed to billionaires at international art fairs.

But the relative simplicity of the art, its eager entertainment appeal, only underscores the sense that it emerged from a moment of rare hopefulness. The artists who took the project most seriously wanted an audience: They wanted to create a series of small encounters with innumerable anonymous and random visitors that would, in the aggregate, transform society for the better. They wanted to lessen the burden of life.

It’s a bit of a mystery why Luna Luna wasn’t more famous, why it disappeared so quickly and made relatively little impact on the discourse of art history. The year, 1987, was on the eve of some of the most momentous changes in world history. The aftermath of that change wasn’t utopia, or liberation, or genuine revolution, but a chaotic age of cynical retrenchment and new forms of technologically enhanced repression. No one would remember a band playing “Nearer My God to Thee” on the deck of the Titanic if the ship hadn’t actually sunk, but merely muddled on through the icebergs.

Still, Luna Luna deserves wider renown, more visitors and new, nonprofit management. The last of these is critical. It costs too much to visit, which subverts the entire purpose of the park. The business executives who revived it have done a public service. They can now do an even more substantial service by donating it, with a large endowment, to a public institution that can preserve it as an essential historical, cultural and artistic artifact.

Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy is on view in Los Angeles through May 12. www.lunaluna.com .

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