Transcript:

Welcome to Ethan’s English cafe dot com’s Video Lesson. My name is Ethan Strauss and today we’re going to be looking at a couple different types of art and the words that go with them. Hope you enjoy the videos and don’t stop practicing!

Welcome to 798 art district, an art district is an area of a city that is devoted to everything artistic. 798 in Beijing here, is often compared to New York’s Greenwich Village or Vancouver’s Granville Island. Although some of the buildings may look older and it may not look like an artistic area, often art districts originally start as poorer and under developed areas, where artists have lower rents as most artists tend to be a little bit poor. As the area becomes more popular, rents tend to go up, a lot of the stores and cafes move in and it becomes a very commercialized, developed area.

There are many different styles or mediums of art, when we’re talking about art; medium means what you use to create your art. Mediums include things like painting, sculpting or even old toys, planes, all sorts of things.

There are many different styles of paintings, including abstract like this one here. This is when you take an ordinary object and change the lines and the shape of it to make it look different, often you can’t even tell what the painting is of without a great deal of thought.

Here is a variety of other abstract paintings, as you can see their meaning isn’t always clear but they’re very interesting looking and they look quite beautiful a lot of the times. Some people like abstract some people don’t, it’s more of a personal preference as to what kind of art you prefer.

Cubism is when you take everyday objects and depict them using cubes or other angled shapes, without any kind of curves to the image, such as these ones here which show people, created by cubes.

In fact those are not very good examples of cubist art. The ones you see here are more properly what we’d consider cubist, I just didn’t see much that day at 798 that was properly cubist. But these are all fairly cubist in that they don’t have a lot of curves and they use a lot of squares and shapes to try and bring out an image.

There is another style we call Minimalist style, minimal meaning small amounts. This is using very basic colours and basic shapes to try and show as much information with as few objects. Something like this could be considered a minimalist, though even this might be a little too much for a minimalist style.

Here’s some more minimalist style art, as you can see it’s very minimalist. There’s not a lot on the canvas, on the picture, it’s just colour and basic shapes.

When looking at paintings, not only is style important but so is perspective. Perspective is talking about how to view something. When talking about paintings, we’re discussion how to show depth, how to show distance. There are three main styles of perspective. The first, as this pictures shows clearly, is linear. Linear is like there are two parallel lines going off into the distance meeting at an end point on the horizon line. The horizon line is the line where the sky meets the ground.

Some more linear perspective art, as you can see the lines are all moving towards a single vanishing point, on the horizon line.

Another style of perspective is what is called diminishing perspective, which shows the objects in the front as very large and the objects in the back as very small or diminishing in size the farther back they go.

Some more examples of some diminishing perspective, as you can see in the background there are mountains and trees which seem very small compared to the people and objects in the front. Because we’re using diminishing perspective, those in the front are always larger.

There is also what we call Atmospheric perspective, which creates the idea of depth through less clarity and less detail such as this one where the images in the back are very unclear and not very detailed.

Atmospheric perspective is often seen in actual photographs from cameras in that those in the front will be very clear and objects in the back will be either foggy or just not very clear at all.

There are two main types of paint with painting; there is both oil based and water based. The difference being what you can paint on, now with an oil based paint you can paint on a wide variety of objects, whereas with a water based paint you need something that can absorb the paint a little bit, like this here which would be a water based on a canvas. Water based paints are also easy to damage through moisture and water, and just damage through water, so it’s a little more dangerous with a water based paint, but it looks quite nice and gives a nice image, a nice picture.

So as you can see within art there are many different mediums and within each medium there are many different styles. But regardless of which medium you choose everyone needs to worry about colour. When looking at paintings, colour is basically broken down in to two main styles of colour. The first is primary colours. Primary colours are made up of blue, red and yellow, of course also within these you also have the white colour which is used to lighten the colours and give a variety of other shades within your primary colours.

The other kind of colour is what is called secondary colour. Secondary colour is made by mixing two primary colours together. Like if you were to mix a yellow and a blue you would get a green, green is a secondary colour.

There is one other type of colour that we should mention as well called tertiary colours. Tertiary colours are colours that are made from mixing a primary and as secondary or maybe three primaries or two primaries and a secondary, whatever types you want. There are many different tertiary colours, including probably the most common which are the browns, beiges and the darker kind of earth tone colours which we see a lot in our world.

When painting a painter needs a variety of tools, including a paint brush which you use to actually paint it, you need a canvas which is the object you are painting on and you also need an easel which is a stand for the painting to sit on so you can paint without bending over and last but not least you need a frame. The frame goes around the painting, it can be a very basic frame like this here, or you could use more complex beautiful frame.

What you can see behind me is a very common style of painting for younger people, it doesn’t require paint brushes, instead you use a spray can. It’s quite common among young people, they really tend to like it a lot in the big cities especially. Though it is illegal, so if you are going to do it, make sure you do it in an area you are allowed to or at least don’t let the police see you do it. Ok?

I’ve actually just noticed that I did not even tell you the name of this art style which was a little silly of me. This art style is called graffiti; it’s very popular and very common. My favourite graffiti artist, as all of these pictures are made by this gentleman, is by the name of Banksy who makes a lot of great art in England and around the world.

Those who do not like painting, maybe sculpting is more your style. Sculpting is taking a material such as clay or metal or cement or marble and changing it into an image, creating something. Depending on the material you are using you will need different tools. For example if you are going to work with metal or rock you need to have a hammer and chisel which is a flat small piece you break pieces of the rock off with. With a hammer and chisel you will end up with a very angled or chiseled look to the statue, at which point you need sandpaper or a sander, which is an electric tool used to smooth edges to make things rounder, to give it a rounder feel to it all. If you are going to work with metal or plastics, such as this here, you just need fire or some sort of a heating element to heat the material, which you can then shape using hammers or metal benders or whatever you are going to use to shape it.

One of the most popular kinds of statues made, are what are called a bust. A bust is something similar to this except usually it is only one person and only from the shoulders up. In ancient Rome you would see a lot of the old Roman emperors had busts of themselves and previous emperors. If you do create something like this or a bust, you are also going to need a pedestal which is the piece it sits on, the lower part where it sits on it. So you’d have a statue on top of a pedestal.

Some sculptures use clay to create images such as these behind me. When using clay to create it, you don’t need a hammers or chisels to shape it; you just use your hands to shape it in the shape you want. Which you then put into a kiln or furnace to dry and harden it, then you can paint it or colour it in any way you wish.

That’s it for all of us here at 798 art district, hope you had a good time, enjoyed the video and learned a little bit about art. If you have any comments or questions, please put them below in the comments section or in the forum. This video was created by Ethan’s English cafe dot com, the first step on your road to fluency. So be sure to also check out our fantastic phrases: Idioms of Art which was created to go along with this video as soon as you are finished here. Alright? Bye Bye!