8th Grade Art – Review – Art styles/genres
Mrs. Holdredge
Surrealism: art that uses dreamlike or weird and strange imagery. The artists
Salvador Dali and MC Escher were both Surrealist Artists.
Salvador Dali was a Spanish 20th Century artist who was instrumental in
developing the style known as Surrealism.
Cubism: A style of art that reduces objects and people to basic geometric shapes.
Cubist portraits will often show both a profile and a front view of a person’s face.
Collage is a style of art that uses Small flat objects cut and pasted on paper.
Collage was first invented by cubist artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
The Spanish 20th Century artist Pablo Picasso is credited as creating both
Cubism and Collage along with the artist Georges Braque.
Dot painting is a style of art used by the aboriginal people of Australia. It was
traditionally a way for people to explain the history of their people because they
did not have a written language.
The Aboriginal People are the native people in Australia. They have a very rich
tradition of art in their culture. They did not have a written language but instead
told their stories through art. One form of painting they did is called Dot
Painting. The image is created almost entirely using small dots of paint. They
had very specific symbols for many of their native plants and animals. Some of
the images were pictures, while others told a story through symbols.
Ceramics is the overall name for working with clay. Ceramic pieces can be
utilitarian or purely sculptural. There are 3 types of hand building methods used
in clay:
Coil construction uses long snakelike pieces of clay to form the object.
Slab Construction uses flat rolled out slabs of clay to form objects.
Pinch construction uses a ball of clay that is pinched to create the shape.
Clay is a naturally occurring material found often in river beds. When heated to a
very high temperature it becomes very hard and no longer pliable. After it is
glazed and fired again, it is a usable object and can hold water and other food and
liquids.
A Tessellation is a design created by using one or more shapes that can fit
together without gaps or overlaps and can repeat endlessly. MC Escher was a
famous artist who created tessellations.
MC Escher was a Dutch 20th Century artist who created both Tessellations and
prints that he called “impossible structures.”
Page 1