Art Appreciation: How to Look at Art?

In this three-hour session, we will discuss what we do in front of works of art. This short session aims to be practical and useful, as it is designed to give you some keys to be more confident in your appreciation of paintings and sculptures.

The first hour will be on paintings and their main visual elements: light, colour, space, line, scale, texture, and more. You will have opportunities to test your knowledge and skills at regular intervals. We will do a 5 minutes comfort break.

The second hour will be dedicated to sculptures. Here again, we will focus on the visual elements and look at the scale, the three-dimensionality, the lines and light, the mass and volume, and more. As for the paintings, the presentation is designed to teach you what to look for in a sculpture, and will be punctuated with several small exercises. We will do another 5 minutes comfort break

Finally, in the third and last hour, we will turn our attention to the question of meaning: how do we figure out what a work of art means? What techniques can we use? We will wonder whether a lot of knowledge is required to find a work’s meaning, or if we can rely on what we perceive and feel, as viewers, in front of the work of art.