Knowing What You See
To begin to try and understand what our eyes are telling our brain, it is important to be familiar with something called Visual Thinking Strategies. These strategies can be used by anyone in a range of subjects in order to attempt to pull meaning from what we are seeing.
These strategies consist of three very simple questions that are used to help us jumpstart a deeper learning and understanding of any topic, whether it's is art and poetry, or math and science. For those of you who think in a more scientific way, it is like creating a hypothesis for artworks based off of observation.
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What is going on in the image?
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What do you see and what makes you say that?
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What more can we find?
After reviewing the list of themes given to you, consider which one you would like to choose for your artwork. How will visual thinking strategies assist you in better understanding and exploring that theme?
In this exercise, you will use your existing visual and cognitive skills in a "problem-solving" process. You will learn to use what you already know to figure out what you do not know about an image.
Example
To the left is an installation piece created by the artist Sarah Sze is called "Untitled (Portable Planetarium)". When using Visual Think Strategies, it is helpful to ask yourself specific questions to start diving deeper into images and artworks.
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What is going on in this picture?
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What do you see that makes you say that?
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What more can we find?
For example, in the image to the left it is hard to actually tell what is going on in the picture. After looking closer at the image and its title, the viewer could say that they see a round shape that represents a planet. There are a lot of objects all around the imaginary planet, which could represent stars or other planets in orbit. What makes us think that is again; the title, the circular orientation of the objects, and even the light source. What more can we find? This installation offers many objects to take a closer look at, but from this image we can find string, buckets, lights, cages, miniature ladders, etc. The piece itself is very overwhelming and clutterd, much like a planet. However, everything seems to visually balance out, similarly to stars and planets in our solar system. What other connections and ideas can you find in this image? If you want to find out more about Sarah Sze and her artwork, here is a link to a video about her!