Notes

Section 1
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TEACHER: In this lesson, we're going to be talking about artistic inspiration-- basically asking ourselves the question where do artists get ideas and how do they turn those ideas into a piece of art? So you might see a piece of art like this example here by Salvador Dali and ask yourself, well, what was the source of inspiration for this?
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I mean it doesn't really look like something that we see in nature. Where did he get the idea for this? Well, all art comes from the creative imagination, and that imagination is influenced by things that we see around us in life or the experiences that we have. So ideas don't just come out of nowhere, right? Maybe someone has a dream or maybe someone sees something
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and they don't realize it, and that becomes part of their experience. So later, they'll transmit these ideas into a piece of art. So in this lesson, we're going to have a few objectives with respect to artistic inspiration. First, we want to look at the origins of artistic inspiration, especially in the context of myth and legend.
00:01:06
Second, we want to discuss visual metaphors and the creative thinking of artists. Third, we want to discuss the process of projecting an idea into a concrete work of art. Basically, once we have our inspiration, how do we actually turn that into artwork? And finally, we're going to look at a few different examples of artwork that was inspired by some different sources,
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including nature, the environment, and people. So as we move forward with this lesson, I want you to keep your ears open for a few key vocabulary terms that will be important for understanding the concepts. These are myth, legend, proportion , balance, symmetrical, medium, technique, frontal, profile, abstractism, modernism, and the name Quintilian. So when we see artwork, it can take
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on a variety of different forms. And here we have two things which are essentially the same subject. Both of these are portraits of women, but they both look vastly different. They were separated by hundreds of years. So part of the reason why these have such different styles is because the artists had different tastes
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or they had different things that they were trying to emphasize. Another reason is maybe just different ways of portraying images made sense to people at different times or different places throughout history. And so, while the one on the right is very abstract, it uses broad strokes and bright colors, compared to the one on the left, which
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is very realistic and subtle, both of them are doing very similar things. So what is an artist? When we say that someone creates artwork, what are they doing? Basically, this is someone who takes some idea from their creative imagination and transmits this into a visual piece without the use of words. And so the idea is that maybe we don't understand
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the language of the person who created this. So if they tried to explain it to us by writing it down or even telling us about it, we wouldn't really get it. But by creating art, the person can communicate some idea. So you look at this example by Roy Lichtenstein, who was an American pop artist during the modern period. You can see, well, he's trying to communicate this sunrise.
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The sun is coming up over the horizon. So even though the style reflects the things that were popular during the time when he made this, when we look at it, we still take in the beauty of the sunrise. So when artists come up with ideas, where do they get these from? Do you recognize this painting here? Do you know what the story is that it's telling?
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This was called The Last Judgment, and this was painted by Michelangelo on the altar wall in the Sistine Chapel. Now Michelangelo was not only a very accomplished painter, but also a very knowledgeable theologian. He had a great deal of knowledge about all the stories in the Bible. And so his painting reflected these stories.
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Basically, by drawing inspiration from the stories of the Bible, Michelangelo was able to create works that helped other people understand these stories in ways that maybe they weren't able to if they couldn't read or if they didn't have as close of attention to detail. So this leads us into one of our primary sources for artistic inspiration in history,
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which is a myth and legend. Basically, religious beliefs at different times throughout history. Have you ever heard things like an elephant never forgets or have you ever heard of Hercules the Greek warrior? These sorts of things are based on stories, whether these were religious or if these were folk tales or whatever.
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But the bottom line is that these ideas inspired people to create works of art in the early stages of human history. If we look at this stone carving here, this is depicting a dream queen Maya. This is a story from the Buddhist faith, in which Queen Maya was said to have had a dream with a vision of an elephant at her side. When she awoke the next morning, she
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had been impregnated with the Buddha Siddhartha. So basically, the people who were familiar with the story thought this was important and they were inspired by this story to create a piece that reflected the details of the story so they could share it with other people. Another important source of art can be dreams. Basically, dreams are our unconscious.
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These are influenced by things that we've seen but maybe we don't really stop to think about the fact that we've seen them or heard them or experienced them somewhere. This example by Henri Rousseau is called The Dream. Now if we look at it, this doesn't really look like a dream, right? It looks like a jungle.
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That's because Rousseau is using what's called visual metaphor, which is when an image is standing in for another image, basically compared to another image. So this example, Rousseau had never actually seen a jungle in his life, but in fact, he created a number of paintings of jungles. And so, to him, a jungle was like something from a dream. And he was drawing upon things that he
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had seen in his mind's eye when he was asleep, maybe, or things that he dreamt about during the day, what a jungle might look like, when he created this image So now we've gotten an idea of how artists are inspired by things, how they're influenced by their surroundings or by their religious beliefs or by their culture. And when they get an idea, though,
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how do they turn it into a piece of art? Now there isn't really a fixed process for this, per se. Different people approach it different ways, but a lot of artists take some very basic considerations in mind when they're going to create a piece, when they're going to act upon their artistic inspiration. So here's are some key elements that we should keep in mind-- design, balance, medium, proportion,
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symmetry, and the technique that we're going to use. So when we talk about design, we're talking about how is the piece going to be laid out? You might ask yourself, well, why is this important? I mean, why don't people to start painting? Well, for a majority of history, art supplies were really expensive to come by. So even if you had a really rich patron
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paying you to do something, you're not just going to start painting in the middle of nowhere, wasting all your paint and not really having any idea what you're doing. Because you might not come up with something that makes sense or that is aesthetically pleasing or that accomplishes the goal that you had set out. So a lot of artists will sort of lay things out in miniature
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before they start. These are examples of what are called gesture drawings or thumbnail sketches from Leonardo da Vinci. He was a master of doing this. See before he created a painting, he would always do these little thumbnail sketches to try to capture the essence of what he was going to do. Basically he asked himself questions
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like what pose should the figures be in, or how should the figures be arranged in relation to one another? Which way should people be facing, where should the large elements of the painting be, where should the small elements of the painting be, and so forth. So this is one really important consideration
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that a lot of artists take into mind. So they get an idea of the design before they start, and how that's going to help them get their message across. Another question an artists might ask himself or herself is what medium and what technique am I going to use? Now, when we talk about a medium, we're basically talking about the supplies
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that the artists use. Right, are they painting it with watercolors, with oil paints, with acrylics? Is it a sculpture in bronze, a sculpture with clay, a sculpture made out of marble? Is it crayons on notebook paper? A lot of artists will use specific media in order to create a specific feel,
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or sometimes because the medium is what's popular at the time, or because it's what the patron wanted. But a lot of times, the issue is what medium is best going to allow me to communicate my idea with other people? And now, another question to ask in this respect is what technique am I going to use when I create something? So if I've decided I'm going to use oil paints,
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there are a lot of different ways I can use oil paints. If you think back to those two images of portraits of women that we saw at the beginning of this presentation, you remember that they looked very different. One of them had really bright colors, broad brush strokes, and kind of an unfinished feel to it, whereas the other one had very soft subtle shadows and a very realistic feel.
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It wasn't quite as abstract, right? Well, even though the medium is essentially the same, they're both paintings. The difference here was in the technique. And the artists had to ask themselves based on the historical context in which they lived, right-- based on the tastes and preferences of the culture in which they lived, which technique is going
00:10:10
to make the most sense for me to communicate this idea? And another important consideration to take into mind is the balance of the piece. This is kind of related to the design. We're going to ask ourselves things like are we going to use symmetry or are we going to affect the proportions of the image in order to create a specific feeling when people look at it?
00:10:32
Now, when we talk about symmetry, one kind of symmetry is what's called linear symmetry, and this is essentially where we have some line dividing the piece, and things on opposite sides of the line are basically mirror images of each other. So you can think of a person. When you see them head on from the front, they're basically the same on the left and right.
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We would say that the person is symmetrical. And so this is one way that artists can create balance. And sometimes they can create emphasis by making one thing on one side different. And so when you look at a piece, that's what you see-- is the thing that's different, because it's not what your brain expects to see there. Another important technique in this respect
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is the manipulation of proportion. This refers to the relative size of objects. By making some things appear bigger or smaller than other things, we can emphasize or de-emphasize certain objects in a piece of art. Or, for instance, if we make a person's head really big on their body or their hands really big, maybe we're trying to emphasize qualities about them.
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There are some examples in history where people made really large hands because the person that they were creating was supposed to be a manual laborer, like a stone cutter or a sculptor, and so they wanted to emphasize the person's manual labor skills. So now that we've considered sources for inspiration and the processes of how artists transmit this inspiration
00:11:53
into a piece of artwork, we're going to look at a few different examples of art that was inspired by different sources. Now, one of these sources is nature. People are inspired by the objects they see around them. If you go up for a walk in the park or something, or if you grow up out where there are woods, or if you go to the lake, you go fishing--
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there are all sorts of natural objects around us. And so this example comes from a photographer named Andy Goldsworthy, and this is called Japanese Maple Flowers. And when you look at this, this may not have existed like this he found it out in nature, right? He may have actually picked up different objects and arranged them. But the point was when he saw these maple leaves,
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they reminded him of something. And so maybe the idea was, he was trying to create something that emulates the sun, or flowers, for example. The idea was that nature inspired him to create a piece of art. Another important example are other aspects of our environment.
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So not just things that we see around us like the trees and the flowers and the leaves and the animals and so forth. But also the places where we live. This cave painting comes from the Stone Age, about 15,000 BC in Spain. And when you think about this, the inside of this cave wall is bulging, so it's kind of caving in on us.
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So maybe the artist, when he saw this, was inspired by the cave wall because it reminded him of these bison that he had seen. And so he felt like this was a good place to create this piece so that people who looked at this would understand the size and the shape and the feeling of being by one of these large animals. Yet another important source of inspiration
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comes from landscapes. This painting by Katsushika Hokusai is called The Great Wave of Kanagawa. This was part of a series that the artist created where the subject was Mount Fuji, this little mountain in the background. He created a lot of things about this, and part of the reason was because this is this element of the landscape where he lived
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that no matter where you were, you could see it. And people had all kinds of stories about it and it had this connection with the gods and with immortality. And so when Hokusai saw this, it inspired him to create a lot of different pieces of artwork about it. So at this point, I think it's important to mention something that the Roman author Quintilian said at one point, which is that art was inspired by nature.
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A work of art differs from nature because an artist will transform nature into art. So basically what he means is that this mountain, for instance, when it exists out in nature, it's just a mountain. But when people take it, when they start seeing things and projecting ideas onto it, and then they take those ideas that they have,
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that they collect in their imagination and then they create something, a representation of this-- they've turned that mountain into a piece of artwork. Because now we're seeing things that this person saw when they looked at the mountain, as well. Another important source of inspiration can be seascapes. This is called Shore and Surf, and is by the American painter Winslow Homer.
00:15:08
Now, Homer painted a the number of seascapes like this. it's basically like a landscape, but instead of having mountains and trees and things, the focus is on the ocean. This is because Homer grew up in New England, and so the sea was a really common site for him. It was important to Homer to capture the essence and the beauty of being in nature.
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And so this particular seascape that he painted tries to help us feel calm, and communicate the mood of the scene being by the sea. A final important source of inspiration that we need to talk about, however is people. If you look at a lot of art throughout history, you'll see tons and tons of people, whether it's important rulers or just
00:15:48
everyday people or people from religious stories. But there are people, people, people everywhere. Now part of the reason for this is because if you think back then, they didn't have cameras. There was no other way to record someone's face, and so painting a portrait was usually a really good way of capturing someone's essence. So when people painted portraits,
00:16:11
it would be either frontal, like this self portrait by Rembrandt van Rijm, the Dutch painter, or it can be in profile, which means that you see the person in a side view. And you can trace the form of their nose and their mouth and their chin and everything. Usually frontal portraits were more common of upper class people, whereas portrait in profile
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were for lower and middle class people. Part of the reason for this might have been that it just takes longer to do a frontal portrait, because you have more details and it's more difficult to accomplish. Whereas, a side portrait is a little easier. You only have half the features to look at. Now I want you to think about the different things
00:16:51
that we learned about in this lesson. We talked about the origins of artistic inspiration, specifically myths and legends. We talked about visual metaphor, if you remember Henri Rousseau's painting of The Dream, and the creative thinking of artists. We discussed the process of projecting an idea into a concrete work of art, thinking
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about design and balance and medium and technique. All those questions that an artist asks himself or herself before starting a work of art. And finally, we looked at a few different pieces of artwork that were inspired by nature, environment, and people. So now when you're looking at other pieces of artwork, you need to be asking yourself what inspired this? And it might not always be something beautiful,
00:17:34
like nature or a landscape or the environment or other people. In fact, there have been a lot of examples of artwork throughout history there were inspired by terrible things. This painting by Pablo Picasso of Guernica was meant to be a social protest against the rise of fascism in his country of Spain. This depicts a really tragic event,
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and he wanted to communicate the anguish of this to other people who looked at it. So art is not always meant to make other people feel happy or warm inside. It's just meant to communicate. And so the sources that inspire us can be many and varied. What things inspire you? And have you ever thought about transmitting that inspiration
00:18:17
into a piece of artwork yourself? Well, if you do that from now on, you have some idea of some of the questions that are important to ask yourself.
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