By the time I joined Fifteen4 ten years ago I had probably seen thousands of websites. But it wasn’t until I worked alongside web designers that I actually started looking at websites. Did the hero image make an immediate impression? Were the fonts readable? Was the navigation intuitive? Did the design compel me to scroll down the page? Was the color scheme consistent?
The distinction between seeing and looking applies to everything we create. If we want users to stop and look – at a website, digital ad, video, social post, etc – we have to put extreme care into the act of creation. We have to inspire the user to not only see, but to look, listen, and learn.
On a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, I went with my daughters to look at Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.” Tragically, but predictably, the room was full of tourists. United in their desire to photograph the painting, they were determined to relegate the masterpiece to yet another digital image (rendering a great service to their social followers, who would no doubt be incapable of googling the painting on their own). Phones held aloft, they would see one of the greatest works of 19th Century European art, but few of them would bother to look at it.
And why should they? What do we really gain by crowding into MoMA, or the Met, or the Louvre with the tour bus-riding masses? How are we meant to think and feel about a hundreds-year old smattering of acrylic on canvas? We don’t want to overeducate ourselves and turn into the Diane Keaton character from Manhattan, pontificating about the “marvelous negative capability” of a steel cube. But mindlessly snagging selfies with famous pieces doesn’t seem gratifying either.
This is what brought me to The Joy of Art by Carolyn Scham. Despite taking art history courses in college and visiting art museums my whole life, the ability to truly look at art – with wonder but an informed understanding of the craft and significance of the work – still eluded me. Scham’s book (written after her own dispiriting experience with tourists at a Picasso sculpture exhibition) illuminates the context, process, and significance behind western art, giving us new eyes through which we can truly look at the work.
“Art is a heightened form of communication. It arises out of the consciousness of an artist who has an intention to express something felt or thought or both.”
Scham (who is a successful figurative artist in her own right) sets out to help readers understand the vocabulary of art, the key developments over time in western painting (ie. the introduction of perspective in the 15th Century, the emergence of landscape painting in the 17th, etc.) and the attributes that set the masters apart from their contemporaries.
She begins by explaining the elements of art: light (or value), color, line, shape, form, space, and texture. Understanding and observing these elements takes us deeper into each painting we view. For instance, the rough texture of “Starry Night” (which is difficult if not impossible to see in a digital image or reproduction) is striking when viewed in person, as are the swirling lines and dark colors. Cézanne and Picasso are perhaps best known for their use of geometric shapes, Johannes Vermeer for his simplified but perfect forms (as illustrated by his famous “Girl with a Pearl Earring”), Thomas Cole for his staggering use of space in landscapes, and the Impressionists for their study of light.
In many museums, it’s the French Impressionists that draw the most crowds, Monet foremost among them. His use of bright pastel colors, fascination with natural light, and semi-abstract depiction of nature immediately draws the eye. But it’s easy to overlook how radical these paintings were when they were first introduced, and how Monet was influenced by earlier painters.
Scham discusses the emergence of light as a subject for earlier 19th Century painters like Jean -Baptiste-Camille Corot and William Turner (each born around a half-century before Monet), who influenced Impressionism. The Joy of Art describes how succeeding movements and the artists behind them propelled painting forward, from flat to linear perspectives, darkness to light, figurative to landscape to abstraction, Vermeer to Goya, Turner to Monet, Matisse to Cézanne, Picasso to Kandinsky, Pollock to Warhol, and on into the present day.
“If we want users to stop and look – at a website, digital ad, video, social post, etc – we have to put extreme care into the act of creation. We have to inspire the user to not only see – but to look, listen, and learn.”
At Fifteen4, we used to joke that it was time to ‘put away the beret’ when developing creative projects for clients. Fine art is largely about individual expression, while marketing is about expressing the values of the brands we serve. But the ability to look at the brands we’re building or promoting – to look not just at the technical requirements of the project but the sentiment they will evoke – is an art form unto itself. With Carolyn Scham’s guidance, we can better understand the qualities of each work of art, and in turn better understand our own creative work in marketing. Through increased understanding, we can feel more deeply for the paintings we love, and better articulate our objections to the ones we don’t. Similarly, we won’t be able to gauge how audiences will respond to our brand and marketing work until we gain a deeper insight into what we’re creating – and why.
The Joy of Art
by Carolyn Scham Barnes & Noble | Amazon | Audible | Apple Books | GoodReads
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