Humanities Study Guide

Humanities Study Guide

Chapter 1: Introduction to Humanities

1.1 What are Humanities? Humanities are the study of the creative processes that humans have historically used to express themselves. These include, but are not limited to, arts such as paintings, sculptures, dance, music, and literature. The focus is to unpack these arts not for their physical worth, but for how they bring awareness to the values that connect us as humans. By looking at these works of art, we can understand other cultures, past and present. Art has helped many people celebrate the good and remember the devastating times in history. Art teaches us what humans have valued throughout time and pushes us to think about our own experiences in creative ways. Simply put: art reveals the essence of our human existence by bringing emotion to life. When studying humanities, we have five important terms to remember when speaking about art: values, taste, artistic form, perception, and conception. Values, which can vary from person to person, are objectives and events that we care about. Taste, on the other hand, is someone's personal preference. This can be anything from ice cream, to music, to perfume; it's what that individual likes. Artistic Form is an artistic composition or structure that conveys meaning. Think of why an author or artist has chosen to create a novel rather than a play, or an oil painting rather than a sculpture. Perception is, as it sounds, anything you can observe. Finally, Conception is what you already know about the work or about the context it exists in. We will use these terms throughout the course to refer to the art we are studying. 1.2 Painting Paintings are our snapshots throughout history. In our daily life, the magic of the world around us becomes mundane, and we often lose our sensitivity to light, color, texture, and beauty in our lives. Paintings give a little bit of that magic back as they invite us to look at the patterns, texture, composition, color, reflections of light, lines, shapes, and the use of different types of paint. In the art world, the medium is the artist's paint of choice . The most common forms of mediums used in paintings are tempera, fresco, oil, watercolor, and acrylic. Artists surprisingly need more than just paint to create a masterpiece; they need a binder. A binder is a substance that is applied to the canvas to allow the paint to stick; it can be any substance that holds a pigment to a surface. Medium Tempera is a paint that is usually mixed and bound by egg yolk. It produces a flat color and is typically used on wood surfaces. Cimabue's Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels is an example of a painting that uses tempera. Fresco is a color pigment that gets dissolved in lime water. Once combined, the substance is applied to wet plaster to dry very quickly. Because of the plaster, it is usually used on walls or ceilings like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. The downside of this medium

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