MOSAIC ART FORM - CONTEMPORARY ART

1. Modern mosaicsare made by professional artists, street artists, and as a popular craft.
Many materials other than traditional stone and ceramic tesserae may be employed, including shells, glass and beads.
Vernacular Mosaic art
Name: Anjana Padmaraj
USN:1DC19AT008
CLASS:7A
Bird mosaic made out of pebbles
mosaic, in art, decoration of a surface with designs made up of closely set, usually variously coloured, small pieces of material such as stone, mineral, glass, tile, or
shell. Unlike inlay, in which the pieces to be applied are set into a surface that has been hollowed out to receive the design, mosaic pieces are applied onto a surface
that has been prepared with an adhesive. Mosaic also differs from inlay in the size of its components. Mosaic pieces are anonymous fractions of the design and
rarely have the dimensions of pieces for intarsia work (fitted inlay usually of wood), whose function is often the rendering of a whole portion of a figure or pattern.
Once disassembled, a mosaic cannot be reassembled on the basis of the form of its individual pieces.
mosaics first were made of uncut pebbles of uniform size. The Greeks, who elevated the pebble mosaic to an art of great refinement, also invented the so-
called tessera technique. Tesserae (Latin for “cubes” or “dice”) are pieces that have been cut to a triangular, square, or other regular shape so that they will fit closely into the
grid of cubes that make up the mosaic surface. The invention of tesserae must have been motivated by a desire to obtain densely set mosaic pictures which could match, in
pavements, the splendour of contemporary achievements in painting.
Materials commonly used where tesserae,stone,glass and other materials like jewellery , paint , wood etc.
Tesserae (Latin for “cubes” or “dice”) are pieces that have been cut to a triangular, square, or other regular shape so that they will fit closely into the grid of cubes that make up the mosaic surface.
In Byzantine mosaics, faces, hands and feet, for example, were set with stone, while cubes of marble, often of coarse crystals, were used to depict woollen garments. Stone was also used for background details (rocks,
buildings), probably to bring about particular illusions. Though marble and limestone were ordinarily preferred, in a period when Roman mosaic cultivated a black and white technique, black basalt was widely employed.
Marble cubes painted red, probably to substitute for red glass, have been found in many Byzantine mosaics, in 9th-century works at Istanbul, for example.
In floors, glass tesserae were used for the strongest hues of red, green, and blue, while softer tints were rendered with coloured stone. With the development of wall mosaic, glass largely took over the functions of stone,
producing tints of unsurpassed intensity and leading to a continuing search for new coloristic effects.
In modern mosaic practice, the main tendency is to build on the unique and inimitable qualities of the medium. Although not a few of the works created in the 20th century reveal the
influence of painting, figurative or abstract, the art came a long way toward self-realization. By and large the modern mosaic makers share with their medieval predecessors
the conviction that there are functions to which the materials of mosaic lend themselves with particular appropriateness.
In Christian mosaics, tesserae of mother-of-pearl or coarse-grained marble cut to round or oblong shapes were used to depict pearl.
the pre-Columbian American Indian cultures, in which, because of its exquisite materials, such as turquoise and garnet, mosaic attained the status of jewelry have not been found in
Western art.
Terra-cotta “threads” were used in Greek mosaics as contours, and tesserae of the same material were frequently used by the Byzantines for the depiction of red objects and garments.
ANCIENT ROMAN MOSAIC
SYRIAN MOSAIC
COLUMBIAN MOSAIC SKULL
MOSAIC EMBLEMMA
SCYTHIAN ART
VERNACULAR ART FORM [1A]
CERAMIC WALL ART

2. In colour and style the earliest known Greek figurative mosaics with representational motifs, which date from the end of the 5th century BCE, resemble contemporary vase painting, especially in their outline drawing and use of
very dark backgrounds. The mosaics of the 4th century tended to copy the style of wall paintings, as is seen in the introduction of a strip of ground below the figures, of shading, and of other manifestations of a preoccupation with
pictorial space. In late Hellenistic times there evolved a type of mosaic whose colour gradations and delicate shading techniques suggest an attempt at exact reproduction of qualities typical of the art of painting.
In Roman imperial times, however, an important change occurred when mosaic gradually developed its own aesthetic laws. Still basically a medium used for floors, its new rules of composition were governed by
a conception of perspective and choice of viewpoint different from those of wall decoration. Equally important was a simplification of form brought about by the demand for more expeditious production methods. In the same period,
the increasing use of more strongly coloured materials also stimulated the growing autonomy of mosaic from painting. As a means of covering walls and vaults, mosaic finally realized its full potentialities for striking and suggestive
distance effects, which surpass those of painting.
• Lyrical Abstraction is a seemingly self-defining term, and yet for generations its origin and meaning have been debated.
• The American art collector Larry Aldrich used the term in 1969 to define the nature of various works he had recently collected that he felt signaled a return to personal expression and
experimentation following Minimalism.
• In the 1910s, several artists were working with this art each in a unique form. Cubist and Futurist artists were working with imagery from the real world and altering it in conceptual
ways to express abstract ideas. Suprematist and Constructivist artists were working with recognizable forms in their art, but using them in ambiguous or symbolic ways, or in a way that
attempted to convey universalities.
• In the modern times, this form of art has evolved into a more lyrical, sensuous, romantic abstractions in colors which were softer and more vibrant.
Lyrical abstraction
• Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid-1950s in Britain and the late 1950s in the United States.The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and
mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane cultural objects.
• Among the early artists that shaped the pop art movement were Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton in Britain, and Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns among others in the United States.
• Pop art and minimalism are considered to be art movements that precede postmodern art, or are some of the earliest examples of postmodern art themselves.
• In the United States, pop art was a response by artists; it marked a return to hard-edged composition and representational art. They used impersonal, mundane reality, irony, and parody to “defuse” the personal
symbolism and “painterly looseness” of abstract expressionism.
Pop art
VERNACULAR ART FORM [1B]
Name: Anjana Padmaraj
USN:1DC19AT008
CLASS:7A
RIVER ROCK MOSAIC
GLASS STONE MOSAIC TILE QUARTZ SEASHELL GLASS BEADS
STAINED GLASS STAINED SEED GEOMETRY ON GASS

3. • Op art, short for optical art, is a style of visual art that uses optical illusions.
• Op art works are abstract, with many better known pieces created in black and white. Typically, they give the viewer the impression of movement, hidden images, flashing and
vibrating patterns, or of swelling or warping.
Op art
• Artists create op art in the best known method, is to create effects through pattern and line. Often these paintings are black-and-white wavy lines
that are close to one another on the canvas surface, creating a volatile figure-ground relationship.
• Another reaction that occurs is that the lines create after-images of certain colors due to how the retina receives and processes light.
• As Goethe demonstrates in his treatise Theory of Colours, at the edge where light and dark meet, color arises because lightness and darkness
are the two central properties in the creation of color.
Expressionism art
• The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music.
• Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of
emotional experience rather than physical reality.
• Expressionism art includes elements of peoples soul as through a filter which rids them of all substantial accretions to produce their clear essence. This is then assimilated and condense into
more general forms, into types, which is transcribed through simple shorthand formulae and symbols.
• Cubism is an early-20th-century art movement which brought European
painting and sculpture historically.
• The term is broadly used in association with a wide variety of art produced in
Paris during the 1910s and extending through the 1920s.
• In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassembled in an
abstracted form — instead of depicting objects from a single viewpoint, the
artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the
subject in a greater context.
Cubism art
• Cubist paintings aren’t meant to be realistic or life-like in any way. After looking at the
subject from every possible angle, the artist will piece together fragments from different
vantage points into one painting.
• The various forms of Cubism are:
• Analytic Cubism, what comes to mind when people think of Cubist artwork.
• Synthetic Cubism, is a natural extension of Analytic Cubism.
mosaic is an art form that appears in widely separated places and at different times in history, in only one place, Byzantium and at one time, 4th to 14th centuries, but then did it rise to
become the leading pictorial art.
VERNACULAR ART FORM [1C]
Name: Anjana Padmaraj
USN:1DC19AT008
CLASS:7A