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Art: How minimalism came about, a personal analysis

Art is subjective. Art is one field where the adage "One man's food is the other man's poison" holds true. Art takes many forms and sometimes is without form as well. One of the forms of art is visual, taking to mean that art is perceived via the organs of vision, the eyes. The most popular of visual arts is painting. Painting is the use of colored media (oil, acrylic, pencil,etc..) on a material (canvas, paper, stone, wood, etc..) to create an image that is appealing. The appeal of the image to the viewer is highly subjective and is emotional.

Art in the early ages (stone age period) comprised simple drawings on the walls of caves. It could probably have been the work of some curious and bored person on a rainy day. Art has evolved so much since then over several centuries, yet sometimes is indistinguishable from those early works. Several media have been experimented with, several materials have been used and several themes tried. But one thing that has remained constant throughout all this is the fact that paintings represented more of what the artist saw and interpreted than what he imagined. Visual art was all about putting on canvas what was seen. And in those ages it required great skill, especially in the capture of how the subjects were illuminated, or in other words, the capture of light. The need and the desire to better capture the scene and the illumination led to the invention of the camera and the advent of photography.

Photography made it a lot more easier and faster to capture what is seen than it takes to paint the same scene. Now the artists suddenly found themselves without anything to paint (what was supposed to aid them ended up making them jobless!). They had to find something to paint and so started to exaggerate their interpretation of what they see. This led to some interesting developments like Expressionism and Cubism, but artists being artists didn't let it stop there. So they started a movement where there was no subject and art stood on it's own. Art for art's sake was taken to the literal extreme! And the best example of such a movement is Minimalism. This style was a bit controversial since the works that were exhibited seemed to require no effort from the artist at all. But for the artists, it is the highest/purest form of art because it is natural, and straight from the sub-conscious mind.

Learn more about this author, Raj C.
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