MART-601 Lessons

Sunlight filters into the room through the stained glass windows of the Magical Art classroom, casting a pretty glow over the tidy desks. The walls of the fifth floor room are adorned with various paintings and student-made artworks on the walls. Art supplies fill the cabinets of the room and there are probably more in the closet located near the professor’s desk at the front. Sixth Year students file into the room, chattering amongst themselves in excitement as they find their seats. That excitement eventually turns into confusion as they realize that class should have started now and their professor was a few minutes late.

Loud footsteps can be heard down the hallway, and a slightly flustered Professor Rosenquist walks in shortly after. The talking of the students dies down as the professor sets her belongings on the desk. She pulls out her wand and gives it a little flick before putting it away. Soft, calm piano music begins playing in the classroom from a hidden source and words begin to appear on the board as the professor clears her throat to address the students.

Sorry for being a few minutes late. There was a slight transmutation incident and this room is quite a walk from the Alchemy Laboratory. Regardless, welcome to your first year of Magical Art! I’m so excited to see all your bright faces today, some familiar, and some I haven’t been acquainted with yet. For those of you who are unfamiliar with who I am, let me introduce myself. My name is Professor Serafina Rosenquist and I am the Alchemy professor as well as the Magical Art professor at Hogwarts. Now, I know exactly what you’re thinking. If my main profession is in alchemy, how does that relate to art in any regards and what could I possibly teach you? On the contrary, alchemy is actually closely related to art. Alchemists have built a whole language based on allegorical symbols and art in order to communicate ideas to each other as well as keep secrets from Muggles and the general public. This requires me to know how to analyze and interpret art in order to understand the ideas conveyed. My profession outside of Hogwarts aside from being a freelance researcher and alchemist is that I’m a game designer employed by the Department of Magical Games and Sports at the Ministry. Being a game designer who works with magical games, I know a thing or two about dealing with different mediums of magical art to make my prototypes.

Granted, I am no Oliver Cartwright or Leonardo da Vinci, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to open the world of magical art to you and give you insight as to how art is used in the wizarding world, as well as let you hone your own artistic skills. Oh, I can smell the internal panic from some of you. For those of you who are not confident in your art skills, or believe you have no artistic talent at all, I can assure you that this is a judgment-free zone. All practical assignments in this course are not graded on artistic talent, but rather if they address the prompt and show your effort. They are all optional, however, I encourage you to try the assignments anyway. Expression is expression, regardless of what other people’s opinions are of your work, so always be proud of your own efforts in conveying it.

Well, that was motivational. Anyway, please bring your attention to the board behind me. If you can’t tell, this list contains the general topics we will be covering this year in Magical Art.

I hope you all are as excited as I am about the syllabus. I have quite a few things in store for all of you this year, and hopefully it’s a change of pace for you as much as it is for me. Without further ado, let’s start on today’s topic, shall we?

In order to even go into what magical art is, we need to have an understanding of what art is and all the different elements and principles that go into it. Magical or mundane, all visual art is based on the same properties no matter what type of medium is used or what time period it’s from. What exactly makes art, well, art? Even better, have you ever stopped to ask yourself “what is art?” or ever tried to define it? Let me answer that for you. In its simplest definition, art is the visual expression of an idea or experience, formed with skill through the use of a medium. When creating art, the artist’s role is to show the world as it is, show the world as it could be, or show us alternative worlds; thus, the artist creates their art with the intent to criticize, fantasize, analyze, and to report or convey their experience. This intent gives art these six functions: ritual, pleasure, commemoration, commentary, persuasion, and self-expression. This not only applies to mundane art, but also magical art. Aren’t the portraits in Hogwarts used as a way to commemorate the subject in not only visual likeness, but also their life and personality when they were alive? How about a photograph of an event in the Daily Prophet that may either persuade you towards the opinion of the corresponding article or cause you to question the content of the article? What if you like looking at the suits of armor in the halls just because you personally enjoy looking at the designs? Art is meant to be spoken about and questioned.

I will let you ponder that thought as we move on. In order to learn about art, we need to know about the fundamental building blocks of any work of art, the elements of design. These elements include: line, shape, form, texture, value, space, and color. Any work of art you will ever come across uses the elements of design as tools to give you the final product. Let’s go into a little more detail.

Line ‘Em Up

A line is the path that is created when an object extends from one point to another. It’s our basic means of recording and symbolizing our ideas, feelings, and thoughts. This could very simply mean anything from making lines when we write or draw on parchment or a canvas to physically shaping materials such as wood, glass, or metal. There are a bunch of ways to describe lines. They can be long, short, rough, smooth, straight, curved, horizontal, vertical, diagonal, dotted, implied, sharp, jagged, hard, soft, light, dark, freeform, and sometimes one line can be a combination of all of the above. The use of line in art is not only used as a primary means of communicating the subject to the viewer, but also as how the artist wants to express the subject.

Look at these two pieces for example. On the left is an illustration on the cover of The Tales of Beedle the Bard by Luxo Karuzos (c. 15th century C.E.) while the one below is Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) by David Hockney (c. 1972). The use of line in Karuzos’ piece looks jagged, rough, and hard. It’s very bold and dark, making the Beedle well defined against the background. However, if you look at the lines on the hat, they look much smoother compared to the rest of the portrait. Now look at Hockney’s painting. Does it have the same dark, hard lines as Karuzos’ Beedle the Bard? No, of course not. You can see a variety of soft, smooth lines throughout the entire piece. The cool thing about this is the contrast between the straight lines in the floor around the pool and the more curved lines in the background as well as in the actual pool. Just from this one element of design, we can ask ourselves questions about what the artist is trying to convey by why they chose to utilize these lines. Why would Karuzos choose to use those particular lines to interpret Beedle the Bard? Is it a statement on how Beedle was while he was alive? Is it a subtle way of hinting at the nature of his tales? Meanwhile, why did Hockney choose to use soft lines in his piece? There isn’t a clear definitive outline anywhere in the painting other than around the water. Why does Hockney want us to focus our attention there with these lines?

Shape of You

A shape is formed when the beginning of a line connects either with its own end, or when it intersects with another line. Shapes are defined within the outline of a two-dimensional area. Although there are an infinite amount of shapes, each of them fall into two categories: geometric or organic. Geometric shapes are the more commonly recognized ones such as squares, rectangles, triangles, hexagons, and circles. They are much more simplified and abstract, which makes them easier to draw. Organic shapes are much more realistic and tend to be one-of-a-kind and freeform. One example could be the difference between an orange drawn as a perfect circle and an orange drawn with every bump and detail. If you look at the paintings of the owls below (The Little Owl - Albrecht Dürer (c. 1508) on the left; Owl - Norval Morrisseau (c. late 1990’s) on the right), you can see how the different shapes are used to depict an owl.

Form the Orange

When shapes gain depth to make them look or physically become three-dimensional, they become forms. For example, geometric shapes such as squares, triangles, and circles become cubes, pyramids, and spheres respectively when form is added to those shapes. Forms, similar to shapes, are defined by the outer boundaries of a three-dimensional object. They can either take up real space or implied space. Real space is in instances such as a sculpture, where the artwork takes up space in reality. Implied space is in two-dimensional artwork where the artist could use color, contrast, light, and shadow to give their art depth and create an illusion. The following piece is called The Crevasse by Edgar Mueller, a German street artist, and it’s a style of art known as Trompe L’oeil, which translates from French to “fools the eye”. Thankfully, this isn’t actually a giant ice crevice in the middle of the road. This style is not only limited to sidewalks, but also walls, and entire buildings. Imagine pairing up some of this art on a building with a strong Fidelius Charm and Muggles would never know anything was there.

Feelin’ It

Our next element of design is texture, which is the look or feel of a surface. We like to think of art as just something to look at, but there are artists who want to stimulate our other senses, in this case touch. Artists that are involved with sculptures, ceramics, textiles, fabrics, bookmaking, and more tend to focus more on the texture of the artwork. Like forms, texture can be either implied or real.

For example, if you were to run your hand along the cover of The Monster Book of Monsters by Edwardus Lima (c. 1978), hopefully after restraining it of course, you can feel the rugged brown fur on the book and, if you’re daring, the smoothness of the tendrils around its mouth. I would not recommend putting your hand near its mouth, even if it’s restrained. Either way, this is an example of actual texture. Implied texture is only seen, not felt. If you were to feel this portrait on the left of Professor Armando Dippet, a former Hogwarts Headmaster, you wouldn’t feel the textures of his skin, clothes, or beard, but the portrait artist that painted him used detail to give the viewer an idea of how those things felt. I might also suggest striking up a conversation with Professor Dippet before deciding to randomly touch his portrait.

Shine a Light

Moving on, value is how light or dark a hue is, which is easier to understand if it’s visualized as a gradient, or a scale, such as the above picture. This scale is for a gray tone, which ranges from pitch black (1) to pure white (9), with various shades of gray in between those two numbers. Any color has a similar scale in value. The number of shades between the two opposites of this scale in any artwork affects the contrast of the art. More shades in between means that the artwork has a low contrast, while fewer shades is going to equal a high contrast. We will be delving more into contrast in the next lesson.

Surround Your Space

The last element of design we will be covering today is space, which is the area in which art is organized. It not only includes the area within a work, but also the area outside and around a work. In two-dimensional artwork, space is often contained within the boundaries inside the paper or canvas the art is on. You may have seen the picture on the left before, the famous Rubin vase. In art, the main object of the work is known as the figure, or positive space, while the area around it is the ground, or negative space. In this case, the white vase shape would typically be the positive space, however, this work was meant to muddle with our brain’s natural figure-ground perception. So, do you see a vase or two faces looking at each other? Most of the time, this distinction is a lot clearer as your brain will naturally perceive the difference. For example, if an object surrounds another object, the surrounded object is the positive space, while the surrounding object appears to be further away, thus making it the background and the negative space. The Rubin vase is an example when the contour between these two objects is more equal, which befuddles the figure-ground distinction and our brains try to make sense of what it sees. In three-dimensional works, the positive space is the area that the objects take up while the negative space is the area between and around the objects.

There are some two-dimensional works that create the illusion of a three-dimensional space by using different techniques such as placing objects on different parts of the canvas or using relative sizing in order to portray perspective. In the photograph below (taken by Karen Kavett), the photographer blurs the background and sharpened the foreground to manipulate space. In reality, all of the objects are probably very close together, however, the blur expanded the space of the photograph and created distance.

Being in your Sixth Year, you should know by now that the figures in the portraits that adorn our halls have a habit of traveling to other portraits. That’s due to the incorporation of magic in the paint that expands the space beyond its boundaries. While yes, the space in the artwork itself is limited to being within the frame, as the artist couldn’t paint anything outside of the material it was painted on, the process of adding charms and such to the paint can warp the space within the work. This warping of space can provide ways for the subjects of portraits to travel to another portrait.

I am aware there is one more element of design left, which is color, however I am afraid we are all out of time for today. Don’t worry, we will go over it in Lesson Three when we will talk about color theory. Your assignments today consist of a relatively short quiz, and an introduction assignment as I would like to get to know all of you better.

Before you come back for the next lesson, I’d like to present you with a challenge. Take a moment to stop and look at any portrait or statue in the halls and think about how that work utilizes at least one of the elements of design that was mentioned today. It could be anything as simple as picking out different shapes you see or something more advanced as describing how the value of that work brings out the texture. As long as you are describing the art using the knowledge from this lesson, the more prepared you will be for the next lesson.

And with that, I must be off. Incidents in the laboratory don’t clean themselves up, unfortunately. See you next time!

Lesson written by Professor Serafina Rosenquist