Another topic discussed by Chase was perspective. Greek artists employed shadows and foreshortening to suggest depth. It was the Greeks who began to add a third-dimension to their artwork. Artists used size and shape to represent importance as was done in King Assurnasirpal’s Encampment an Stables. Egyptian representations of humans were often inaccurate typically displaying a profiled face, forward facing shoulders, and side-facing legs. Overall, Chase relays the idea that art is a reflection of the culture and time period of which it was created in combination with the artist’s personal view of the world.Ĭhapter 4 in Chase’s work describes the way in which artists used space.
Chinese reflected the importance of landscape as the “moods of man and the infinity of God.” In America, once the country had established itself, artists began to look to painting the countryside as an enthusiastic form of patriotism. Romans enjoyed vibrant paintings of landscapes as sharp contrasts to the turmoil-ridden cities they lived in. Egyptians were more concerned with the shape of objects and viewed a scene as a map thus, they represented what they saw with simple shapes and lines. Chase supports her statements by giving examples of the ways different cultures have created art. Artists are faced with the scenario of confining a real life view to a canvas- restructuring and tweaking what is visible in order to express his ideas on it. Artists see what is in front of them and reinterpret it to match their view of the world. According to Chase, regular people see art in colors, near or far, big or small. Though the words ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’ are seemingly interchangeable, the two writings convey differences in perception.Īlice Elizabeth Chase begins her work by describing the difference between an average person’s view of art versus an artist’s view of art. Two pieces, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and Alice Elizabeth Chase’s Looking at Art, discuss ways to view and understand art. Because of it’s nature, interpreting art, subjectively, gives the piece more meaning.
Art is not merely strokes of color or graphite on a piece of canvas to be simply looked at- art is to be interpreted.