How to Analyse...

1. Basic Information

The name of the artist

What country are they from?  (This is important as it puts the work into context)

The name and date of the series that you are interested in.

The name and date of any images you choose from the series to analyse.

Research and explain what the artist’s intentions are.  What concept, message or meaning did the artist want to communicate or explore?

2. Visual Qualities

What do you like about the image?

What is the image of?

What is the main focus?

Can you write about any formal elements?  Line, Colour, Shape, Form, Texture, Pattern, Tone…

How has the artist achieved the meaning/concept or message?

What composition style have they used?  Leading lines, golden section, the rule of thirds…

How have they used the lighting in the image?

If they have used people s can you read any body language or facial expression?

3. Camera Settings (Photography)

What shutter speed do you think they have use?

What ISO do you think they have used?

Discuss the aperture settings used? 

Shallow/long depth of field

Where have they focused?

4. Relate to your own work
This is VERY important so do not leave it out! By answering these questions you will be explaining to the examiner just how you intend to use this investigation work to inspire your own work.

How will you be influenced by this artist?

What techniques, concepts or visual effects are you most inspired by?

How will you take this influence and use it in your work?
 

Y9 Alice's Adventures In Wonderland - in under an hour

Y10 Len Tabner Seascapes Homework

Len Tabner was born in South Bank on the River Tees near Middlesbrough. His father had been a merchant seaman and Tabner remains fascinated by the grim grandeur of the industrial northeast. He lives a few hundred yards from the highest cliffs in England, at 650 feet above the sea, and near the potash mine in Boulby—the deepest mine in Europe.

It is a landscape of extremes and frequently of violent weather, but Tabner is not an artist to stay huddled indoors in his studio. He is to be found on the beach with his easel weighted down against the wind or, like Turner, on board ship in the middle of a gale. His is an elemental art, visionary in its scope. Due to these conditions, his paintings are produced with a sense of great urgency, with a rich variety of materials combining and competing on the surface of the paper. It is a question of evocation rather than description, although the paintings are definitely rooted in specific locales.

Despite working from the Falkland Islands to Japan, Tabner demonstrates that we can understand the whole by knowing one small spot extremely well. His home territory has been transformed in his lifetime - enabling him to chart the death of mines and shipyards and record the birth and heyday of North Sea power.      

Tabner tries to capture the feeling, the essence, the experience of the landscape