Joanna James
The Seven Elements of Art - Visual composition more than meets the eye
Paintings, sculptures or any other works of visual art appealing to the human eye have a set of “elements” in play in the background, just as the ensemble of instruments in an orchestra, joining forces to create a visual composition — the elements of art that make up the creative expression.
Colour is easily the most obvious visual perception perceived by the human eye. At the core of it is the vibrant colour wheel, which sets the basis for the widely spoken colour theory and how colours can work together in fascinating ways to appeal to the human eye in many different ways.
Although identified as a separate element of art, value strongly associates with the aforementioned “colour”. It is the degree of darkness or lightness of a colour. To put it in a more understandable manner, value refers to the amount of white or black added to the basic form of colour discussed above, or in other words pure colour or hue, creating lighter and darker gradations of a single colour.
Texture is how the surface of an artwork is perceived by the eye. It can be both implied and real; implied is where artists add texture with the use of excellent brushwork, layers of paint and shading, to give the illusion of an intended surface, whereas real is the use of actually tactile surfaces, such as the paint on a canvas, or the material of a sculpture.
Short, long, vertical, horizontal, diagonal, curved, straight, thin, or thick — appearing in a few different forms, line is a crucial element of art, acting as the fundamental structure of most artworks. The application of lines can be made different by variations in width, direction and length.
Shape in the elements of art can be perfectly described as a line that is “closed”. Shapes are of two primary types, “geometric” and “organic” or rather “free form”, where geometric takes the shape of geometrically defined shapes, such as circles, squares, rectangles, or triangles and whereas organic shapes do not, making perfect sense of its moniker, free form.
Form is almost like the aforementioned shape, but differentiates itself as a separate and independent element of art with the slight difference of being more related to three dimensional shapes, whereas shape is associated with more of two dimensional shapes. Also, form is considered to refer to the artwork’s entire form.
One of the most obvious elements of art observed in a typical Sri Lankan art gallery and used by Sri Lankan artists as well as artists all over the world, space talks about the depth portrayed in a composition. In paintings and drawings, space would be the illusion of three dimensionality, whereas in sculptures and works of architecture, would be defined as the area around the object.
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