CHAPTER 2 - Vision and Form

Abstract

Paintings and sculptures act on one's thoughts and feelings through the use of one's eyes' in the efforts to govern one's reactions to the work, artists use a pictorial language just as writers use a verbal one. Writers arrange sequences of words to evoke emotion and atmosphere, define character, and seek to achieve a flow of sentences that have rhythm, variety, unity, and balance, so artists use their visual language to express the content of their ideas in works of art. The five basic elements of the visual language are line, shape, color, tone, and texture. All these elements are not necessarily used together in every work of art; artists might choose to concentrate on the use of two or three of them, or sometimes only one, such as line or color, but the choice might depend on the material and tools used. Whatever aspects of form are chosen, fine art is the result of exploiting the possibilities of tools, materials, and the pictorial language; the quality of the artist's imagination and talent are the other determining factors.