DECORATED POTTERY....

DECORATED POTTERY....

At a basic level painted pottery consists of items fashioned out of clay, hardened through a firing process, and then decorated with color pigments. However, this process can be as simple or as complicated as the potter sees fit. Different types of clay may be blended, pottery can be a multitude of shapes and sizes, various firing techniques may be used, and the ways in which pottery can de decorated are innumerable.
Painted pottery has existed for several thousand years. In fact, shards of painted pottery have been excavated from the remains of some of earth's oldest civilizations. From these remains, anthropologists have ascertained that pottery has been considered to be both useful as well as decorative since its inception.

Tere are a number of Biblical references to clay and pottery wherein humankind is compared to clay and God is equated with the potter who creates and molds complex beings from a simple lump of earth. "Yet, Lord, thou art our Father; we are the clay, and thou art our potter" (Isaiah 64:8). Today, painted pottery is still used in many different ways. Pottery can be found in the kitchen as a receptacle for food and liquid or in other areas of the home as a form decoration akin to sculpture.
The fact that throughout history pottery has been both useful and decorative leads to a discussion concerning pottery's inherent value as an art form. In other words, at the most basic level, can all painted and fired clay be considered art, or should some pottery forms be thought of as well developed craft? If, in fact, some painted pottery may be considered art, whereas other forms of painted pottery are craft, then what specific characteristics or qualities must exist in order for painted pottery to be seen as art? The answer to this question may lie in the permutations the potter creates in the clay, the firing, or decorations of the art or craft. "Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for beauty and other for menial use?" (Romans 9:21)

sourcehttp://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/artartists/decpot.html

What Is Art...? What Is An Artist..?

INTRODUCTION

ART has not always been what we think it is today. An object regarded as Art today may not have been perceived as such when it was first made, nor was the person who made it necessarily regarded as an artist. Both the notion of "art" and the idea of the "artist" are relatively modern terms.

Many of the objects we identify as art today -- Greek painted pottery, medieval manuscript illuminations, and so on -- were made in times and places when people had no concept of "art" as we understand the term. These objects may have been appreciated in various ways and often admired, but not as "art" in the current sense.

ART lacks a satisfactory definition. It is easier to describe it as the way something is done -- "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others" (Britannica Online) -- rather than what it is.

The idea of an object being a "work of art" emerges, together with the concept of the Artist, in the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy.

During the Renaissance, the word Art emerges as a collective term encompassing Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, a grouping given currency by the Italian artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century. Subsequently, this grouping was expanded to include Music and Poetry which became known in the 18th century as the 'Fine Arts'. These five Arts have formed an irreducible nucleus from which have been generally excluded the 'decorative arts' and 'crafts', such as as pottery, weaving, metalworking, and furniture making, all of which have utility as an end.
But how did Art become distinguished from the decorative arts and crafts? How and why is an artist different from a craftsperson?

Art & Artists in the Ancient World and Middle Ages Professor Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe

The term for ART in Greek (tekhne) and Latin (ars) does not specifically denote the 'fine arts' in the modern sense, but was applied to all kinds of human activities.
Art was characterized by Aristotle as a kind of activity based on knowledge and governed by rules. An individual became a painter or a sculptor, or a shoemaker, by learning the rules of the trade.
The Greeks applied rules as a means of bringing order to the perceived chaos of nature and the world around them. They consciously sought order, clarity, balance, and harmony in their works. Rules provided a measure of control, and through control a form of comprehension. To maintain order it is necessary to apply rules, and the tradition that supports them. This is the nature of the "classical" which is perforce traditional and conservative.

In this situation, painters and sculptors differed merely in their competence or capability in applying the rules of their trade. They were admired for how well they mastered the rules, for their technique and skills.
Neither the painter nor the sculptor, however, could be "inspired" or work according instinct or follow intuition. In Ancient Greece, painting and sculpture were distinguished from Poetry and Music, which were the products of divine inspiration and stood outside the rules governing mundane activity. Poetry and Music were both highly respected in the Ancient World. It is indicative of their relative status that Poetry and Music are assigned Muses, but not painting and sculpture.
The Greek word for a painter of a sculptor was banausos, meaning literally a mechanic. The term reflects the low social standing of the painter and sculptor in ancient society, which was based on the ancient contempt for manual work. This ancient Greek prejudice against those who work with their hands and who serve utilitarian interests still informs to some degree the distinction between the Fine Arts and the crafts.

The system of the so-called liberal arts was organized in the late antique period, after the time of Plato and Aristotle. Its early development is unclear, but a Martianus Capella seems to have been the first to list the seven liberal arts that later gained recognition: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music. Of the Fine Arts, only Music is included.

Although attempts were made at one time or another to include painting and architecture among the liberal arts (by Pliny, Galen, Vitruvius, and Varro), the visual arts were generally ignored. Seneca explicitly denies a place for painting among the liberal arts.
The Greeks and the Romans recognized no system for the "fine arts", and regarded placed the visual arts among the manual crafts.

The early Middle Ages inherited from late antiquity the view of art as a "teachable" activity. It was during this time that the term artista was coined but which indicated not an "artist" in the modern sense, but either a craftsman or a student of the liberal arts.

Throughout the Middle Ages, painters and sculptors were afforded little status and remained largely anonymous. As in antiquity, delight was taken in their work, but it was admired in terms of workmanship, or for the use of colour or precious materials (gold, gems). Painters and sculptors were judged on their skill and technique.
The Middle Ages also inherited from antiquity the scheme of the seven liberal arts which served not only for a comprehensive classification of humanknowledge, but also for the curriculum of monastic schools down to the 12th century. The liberal arts were by then divided into the Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic) and the Quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music).

By the 12th and 13th centuries, the liberal arts had become an inadequate system for classifying knowledge, and with the rise of the universities other subject areas were established such as philosophy, medicine, jurisprudence, and theology.
At this time was formulated the seven mechanical arts (corresponding to the seven liberal arts): lanificium, armatura, navigatio, agricultura, venatio, medicina, and theatrica.

However, even within this scheme, painting and sculpture are listed in the company of several other crafts as subdivisions of armatura, and thus continued to occupy a subordinate position even among the mechanical arts.
The visual arts were confined to the artisans' guilds. Because they ground their colours, and had the same patron saint (St. Luke), painters belonged to the guild of apothecaries and physicians. Sculptors joined the goldsmiths' guild, while architects were associated with masons and carpenters.

sourcehttp://www.arthistory.sbc.edu/artartists/artartists.html

The Meaning Of Art

Although today the word art usually refers to the visual arts, the concept of what art is has continuously changed over centuries. Perhaps the most concise definition is its broadest—art refers to all creative human endeavors, excluding actions directly related to survival and reproduction. From a wide perspective, art is simply a generic term for any product of the creative impulse, out of which sprang all other human pursuits — such as science via alchemy, and religion via shamanism.

Artists, deliberately or not, work under the influence of other artists of the past and present. Much of the development of individual artists deals with finding structured principles for how to express certain ideas through various kinds of symbolism. For example, Vasily Kandinsky famously developed his use of color in painting through a system of stimulus response, where over time he gained an understanding of the emotions that can be evoked by color and combinations of color. Contemporary artist Andy Goldsworthy, on the other hand, chose to use the medium of found natural objects and materials to arrange temporary sculptures; the only record of these sculptures brought back to the world comes in the form of a modest photograph.

The word "art" comes from the Latin ars, which, loosely translated, means "arrangement" or "to arrange", though in many dictionaries you will simply find it tautologically translated as "art". This is the only universal definition of art that whatever it is was at some point arranged in some way. A few examples where this meaning proves very broad include artifact, artifice, artillery, medical arts, and military arts. However, there are many other colloquial uses of the word, all with some relation to its etymological roots.

It is frequently argued that art cannot be defined, partly because people's standards for judging what is or is not art are completely subjective. Confusion about the meaning of the term derives from two sources: the first of these is that multiple meanings of the word are often used interchangeably in conversation. Secondly, confusion can stem from the fact that in the modern world, art is often seen as belonging to one class and excluding others. Art is seen as a high-status activity associated with wealth and the ability to purchase both works of art and the leisure required to enjoy them. Much of the confusion about what can be or cannot be deemed art comes from an unconsidered use of the word to describe things or people as good or bad, as in such expressions as "(that meal was) a work of art" or "the art of deception". It is this use of the word as an absolute measure of qual ity or value that gives the term its appearance of subjectivity.

In addition, most people's choices of what is art fall well in line with generally accepted standards deriving from education and other social factors. Most people did not consider the depiction of a Brillo Box or a store-bought urinal to be art until Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp placed them in a specific context, ie. the art gallery, which then inherently associated the objects with the values that usually define something as art. This, so called "institutional definition of art" was expressed for the first time by George Dickie in 1974. Indeed, most viewers of these objects initially rejected such associations, as the objects did not, themselves, meet the accepted criteria. It required that the objects be absorbed into the general consensus of what art is for them to achieve the near-universal acceptance as art they enjoy today.http://www.mary-ebiztech.blogspot.com/ Once accepted and viewed with a fresh eye the smooth, white surfaces of Duchamp's urinal are strikingly similar to classical marble sculptural forms, whether the artist intended it or not. This type of recontextualizing provides the same spark of connection that we expect from any 'good' art.

Given the present association of art with status, it is somewhat ironic to note that previous to the 14th century in Europe, artisans were considered as being of a lower caste, since they laboured with their hands. It was only after Europe was re-exposed to Classical culture that artists gained their current association with high status, though arrangements of 'fine' and expensive goods have always been used by institutions of power as marks of their own status. This can still be seen in the commissioning or purchasing of art by big businesses and corporations as decoration for their offices.

Art as an entity

Definitions of art and aesthetic arguments usually proceed from one of several possible perspectives. Art may be defined by the intention of the artist as in the writings of Dewey. Art may be seen as being in the response/emotion of the viewer as Tolstoy claims. In Danto's view, it can be defined as a character of the item itself or as a function of an object's context. For Plato, art is imitation. Obviously, there is validity in each of these perspectives and any useful definition of art must, at minimum, address all these categories.

There is wide disagreement over what constitutes art, and there is no single definition that is widely agreed upon. A common view is that art requires a creative and unique perception of both the artist and audience. For example, a common contemporary criticism of some modern painting might be, 'my five-year old could have painted that' implying that the work is somehow less worthy of the title art, either because the viewer fails to find meaning in the work, or because the work does not appear to have required any skill to produce. This view is often described as a lay critique and derives from the fact that in Western culture at least, art has traditionally been pushed in the direction of representationalism, the literal presentation of reality through literal images.

Art can connote a sense of trained ability or mastery of a medium. It can also simply refer to the developed and efficient use of a language so as to convey meaning, with immediacy and or depth. Making this judgment requires a basis for criticism: a way to determine whether the impact of the object on the senses meets the criteria to be considered art, whether it is perceived to be ugly or beautiful. Perception is always colored by experience, so a reaction to art as 'ugly' or 'beautiful' is necessarily subjective. Countless schools have each proposed their own ways to define quality, yet they all seem to agree in at least one point: once their aesthetic choices have been accepted, the value of the work of art is determined by its capacity to transcend the limits of its chosen medium in order to strike some universal chord (which, oddly enough, tends to be the most personal one).

Art also appeals to human emotions. It can arouse aesthetic or moral feelings, and can be understood as a way of communicating these feelings. Artists have to express themselves so that their public is aroused, but they do not have to do so consciously. Art explores both human emotions and ways to arouse them and good art brings something new and original in either of these two respects.

Consider photography. Are photographs of un-posed 'real life' to be considered art? The common answer is overwhelmingly yes, even though many of these photographs simply seek to reproduce by machine what people can see with their own eyes. However, the reproduction is not neutral a selection is being made by the artist. This is also one of the goals of found art: to recontextualize the art of everyday objects.

Different forms of art

There are a variety of Arts, including visual arts and design, decorative arts, plastic arts, and the performing arts. Artistic expression takes many forms, painting, drawing, sculpture, music, literature, performance art and possibly architecture are the most widely recognised forms. However, since the advent of modernism and the technological revolution, new forms have emerged. These include film, photography, comics, video art, installation art, conceptual art, and computer art.Within each form, a wide range of genres may exist. For instance, a painting may be a still life, a portrait, a landscape and may deal with historical or domestic subjects. In addition, a work of art may be representational or abstract.

The use of art

There are many who ascribe to certain arts the quality of being non-utilitarian. This fits within the 'art as good' system of definitions and suffers from a class prejudice against labor and utility. Opponents of this view argue that all human activity has some utilitarian function, and these objects claimed to be 'non-utilitarian' actually have the rather mundane and banal utility of attempting to mystify and codify unworkable justifications for arbitrary social hierarchy.

The history of art

Usually this refers to the history of the visual arts. Although ideas about the definition of art have changed over the years, the field of art history attempts to categorize changes in art throughout time and better understand how art shapes and is shaped by the outlooks and creative impulses of its practitioners. Although many think of Art history as purely the study of European art history, the subject encompasses all art, from the megaliths of Western Europe to the paintings of the Tang dynasty in China

sourcehttp://www.pet-portraitartist.com/learning-to-paint-and-draw/meaning-of-art.htm