Exploring moods, atmospheres and stories in paintings.

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Art Dissertation

Exploring moods, atmospheres and stories in paintings.

This year I have decided to base my projects on visual communication.  I intend to investigate how artists are able to communicate stories through paintings.  I will also consider any moods and atmospheres they create in these paintings.  

At AS level I looked at nightlife and the social environment of pubs and clubs.  I enjoyed doing this and I think this may influence my A2 work as well.  I would like to develop my Unit 5 problem solving unit to looking at different situations - different stories, atmospheres, moods, etc.  I may look at paintings creating happy atmospheres and compare them with paintings, which create unhappy, tense atmospheres; like 'The Scream' by Edvard Munch.  To enable me to complete this properly I will use this Unit 4 contextual study to develop an understanding of the work of several relevant artists.  Some of these artists are Edvard Munch, Kathe Kollwitz, Rita Duffy, Terry Bradley, etc.  This should give me an insight into the different ways that different artists use to create strong atmospheres and moods.  I think colour, line, style and tone will be the main ways in which this is done, but how?

Edvard Munch

A gifted Norwegian painter and printmaker, Edvard Munch not only was his country's greatest artist, but also played a vital role in the development of German .  Expressionism is artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in him.

Edvard Munch has created such a strong, tense and fearful atmosphere in his painting 'The Scream'.  "'The Scream' is regarded as an icon of existential anguish."  I think he has been able to do this so well due to his choice of colours and style of painting.  The composition of the piece also has a great effect as the strong lines of perspective and wavy curves contrast with each other adding to the tense mood created.  

Munch wrote several versions of a prose-lyrical associated with his painting, one of which reads:

I was walking along a path with two friends –

the sun was setting –

suddenly the sky turned blood red –

I paused; feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city –

Join now!

my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety –

and I sensed an infinite scream passing through                  nature.

Munch said this about his paintings - The Frieze of Life, a series of deeply personal, highly expressive motifs in paintings and graphic works, imbued with existential angst. “The idea was to paint life as it was lived or one's own life - Besides that, I had already had the whole Frieze of Life ready in poetic form for a long time, so you could say that all the spade ...

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