Human Form In Art, By Elizabeth Opalenik

body and how it was used to draw the gazes of males in visual media.

The body has been cut, burned, exploited, sexualized, glorified, abused and stretched out to its limits, as a form of curiosity in art. The body has been a central theme throughout art history and in the contemporary world today. It is recognized as a symbol of identity, social politics, culture and belonging. Art cannot be made without the presence of the body and its interaction with the material world. Artists have continually tried to redefine the meaning behind the encounters of the body and the body as the medium. From early works in Western paintings and sculpture, the body served as an idealized figure, only made to represent the mythical, biblical, the rich and historical figures. The representations of the body seem to only serve

Art has had a profound significance to me throughout my life. As a child, art was my retreat from the mundane of the world. I found a way of communicating the things I was feeling with others around me! It gave me different perspectives and ways of looking at events, emotions, and people. All of these perspectives helped shape me, made me contemplate the individual I wanted to be and how the world behaves. Art answered as many questions as it posed. It made life worth living. From that moment on, there would never be a day in my life that didn’t involve art in some form or another.

In “Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic photographs”, Elizabeth Edwards argues the importance of looking at the physical attributes

How has the artist used the body as a subject matter to represent issues of identity ad culture in his/her society?

Upon glancing at various beautiful paintings there is to offer at the Museum of Fine Arts, only one astonishing artwork caught my immediate attention. The artwork is named “The Windmill on the Onbekende Gracht, Amsterdam” and it was painted by Claude Monet of the impressionist period in 1879. The medium is oil which is used for the oil painting on a canvas. Besides the subject matter, the content of the overall painting represents a serene and beautiful setting in which one can take ease and enjoy. It is a breathtaking view that captures a fleeting moment of a town setting by the riverside. Furthermore, the title also signifies the importance of the central object, which is the windmill.

The human figure is something that artists have portrayed in sculpture for thousands of years. Each culture and time period had different reasons behind the way they chose to depict humans. In ancient Egypt, pharaohs were shown as idealized and emotionless, like gods. Yet in Hellenistic art, people were depicted in dramatic scenes that showed them as very human and emotional. The way humans have been depicted through sculpture and the reasons behind these canons have evolved and changed over time.

Finally, the depiction of figure is perhaps the most interesting and intellectually challenging element in this piece. The figure, while emotionally withdrawn from the viewer, is physically imposing. She is looking down and away from the viewer, as if the isn’t aware that she is being watched. Her mask-like facial features also do little in the way of conveying emotion. Her body, however, is quite different. The dark thick lines shaping her muscles and limbs, the detail in the curls of her hair, the placement of her fingers, and her exposed breast all demand the attention of the viewers’ eye. The bold lines that define her legs, waist, and hip, make her seem intrusively part of our space. The awkward placement of her

In many minds art is, art. However, when you take a deeper look you will notice even the slightest flick of the hand while holding a paintbrush can give a piece a totally different meaning. When comparing, and contrasting artists’ work it is very important that you are visually literate. In many cases art is not appropriately appreciated due to only seeing the surface, and in some cases ethnocentrism.

The question that I have chosen is ‘how have photographers used formal elements to objectify their subjects?’. In this essay I will try to answer that question while including some relevant history of photography and formalism, and examples of photographers which I think have used formal elements well in producing images that are aesthetically pleasing because of their visual qualities, by having good use of composition and colour manipulation, and that are not only good artworks because of their history or meaning behind them.

2. How the human form was represented has changed drastically throughout history. Some of the the ways in which the representation of the human body in sculpture evolved over time are evident in comparing works of art such as Menkaure and his Queen Kah-merer-nebti II, Doryphoros, the Farnese Hercules, and Prima Porta Augustus.

Notwithstanding anyone specific expertise or knowledge of painting technique, each of us can quantify beauty as it relates to art in our own minds. We can see the growth of art and how it provokes emotion, understanding, and experimentation over time. Over the course of time, it appears that art, artist, and the lovers of the various periods of art seem to move beyond a name or basic aesthetics of style and venture into a deeper more comparative analysis of the work and its position in our culture.

In Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, One Art, it displays the acceptance Bishop has for losing things. Each stanza the losses get more significant, until she finally displays the one thing she can’t accept losing. Elizabeth Bishop uses techniques such as verse form and repetition to display her feelings toward those losses.

The study of the human body has always been an important focus in the field of art. An artists’ main focus is on the outward appearance of their subject, always aiming to be aesthetically pleasing for their audience. With modern advances in radiological technology, artists and radiographers can now create art focused on the inner beauty of humanity rather than the outward beauty. Starting in ancient Greece and continuing through to our modern day society, artists have been creating images of “the perfect human body” purely for aesthetic reasons. Today’s media has kept this idea alive by illustrating unrealistic, and sometimes unhealthy, body expectations in advertisements leading to our society to take the preference of beauty aesthetics over

A fascination with the human body, body were an experience that could somehow be held in common. The ways in which we might experience the body as connected or represent it as disconnected in a live performance. Shifting attention from traditional art object to the artist’s physical action further proposed that art existed in real space and real time. Marina Abramovic, a pioneer of performance art began using her own body as the subject, object, and medium in the early 1970s as she said, ‘In performance my body is object and subject.’ For the exhibition