How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone by Ben Street

Author:Ben Street [Street, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: art, Criticism & Theory, history, General, Study & Teaching
ISBN: 9780300257625
Google: liQ7EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-11-15T00:24:29.906529+00:00

Fig. 19 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Trees, 1643. Etching, engraving and drypoint, 21.3 × 27.9 cm (dimensions of sheet). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Like any movement our bodies make through space – be that performing an elaborate dance, hailing a taxi or swiping through images on our phones – every gesture made by an artist has its own tempo, weight and direction. In the case of this particular work, a decision has been made, at some stage in the process, to allow those movements to remain visible. This gives rise to an important question in our engagement with works of art we might not have seen before: why stop there? This emphasis on leaving the artist’s physical gesture as a visible trace is common across many works of both two- and three-dimensional art. Any work of art might show these marks, but not all artists decide to grant a viewer access to them. Abstract works of art record these movements especially well – you might think here of the dripped and poured paintings of Jackson Pollock, whose gestures of making are especially apparent to the eye – but it’s no less true of works like this one, which is both a depiction of a rural landscape and a collection of complex and diverse movements of the artist’s hand on a flat surface.

Paying close attention to the movements of the artist’s hand will open up a work like this in unusual ways. Notice how certain areas of the paper remain relatively free from any marks at all, and are light and airy, while others are clustered and overlaid to create a greater visual density. These marks correspond pretty closely to the subject matter they’re used to depict – darker areas for the knotty trunks of trees, lighter ones for the scudding clouds above. In this sense, they’re illustrative marks, doing a job. But before these marks get translated into images of things, they stitch together a pattern of darks and lights that runs all the way across the paper in a kind of visual rhythm. They work, in other words, on an abstract level, acting as a means of building up a complex visual experience for the viewer that goes beyond a straightforward rendering of a place. They also suggest different movements and positions of the artist’s hand and wrist. See how the bottom right section of the image feels tightly packed and dense: that implies small movements, probably only of the artist’s fingers as he grips the etching tool. By contrast, his hand is much looser in the top left, as his wrist rocks back and forth to generate those freely drawn swirls. So it’s an image that packs in not only an array of tonal shifts, across a spectrum of darks and lights, but also a range of methods of applying line to surface. There’s a whole repertoire of hand movements implied in what we see, as well as different techniques of engraving, each one of which has a psychological dimension too: anxious tension versus relaxed looseness, maybe.

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