College week 2/2, Art History, 12th September

Tuesday means Art History with Jo, for the time being anyway.   I had missed the very first class yesterday so was rather please when we went back over some of what had been raised then.  This included spending some time discussing various definitions of art, including the Oxford English Dictionary which opines thus:  "the expression of creative skill through a visual medium such as painting or sculpture; or the product of such a process: paintings, drawings and sculpture collectively". The OED also defines craft as "an activity involving skill in making things by hand, or things made by hand". This prompted a quite heated debate, enlivened by (the other) Jo's strongly critical reaction to some of the Tracey Emin work currently on show at the RWA, and almost derailed by one of our number who swerved off into a rant about defining the whole of nature and the works of his divine creator as art.  Oh dear... We then learnt how to unpick and analyse a painting/art-work by looking hard at two paintings by Piero della Francesca of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, 1472-3; 

and then did some further analysis in groups of a range of images of more recent work.  The first half of the session was stimulating and I  learnt something about who to read a painting, but the second half was rather dreary, as we were relying on guess work too much of the time, and we were not terribly engaged.  But overall I got quite a lot out of the session and will feel more comfortable in future about using quite a conscious analytical framework to help me think about context, meaning, technique, symbolism etc.