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The importance of visual literacy
The importance of visual literacy
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Visual Literacy can be defined as a way of using sight to evaluate, apply or create. Education, art history, art criticism, philosophy, graphic designers and more use the term “visual literacy” to mean different things. The term is widely contested. Wikipedia defines it as “the ability to interpret negotiate, and make meaning, from information presented in the form of an image.” There are many definitions used to define the term and all are lacking. No one definition will suffice to encompass the whole definition.
Studying visual literacy means understanding the process of formally analyzing art or architecture; identifying who, what, when, where, why, and how, along with the identifying formal elements of line, color, medium, texture, shape, space. Visual and aesthetic qualities must also be considered: composition, movement, scale, light, mood, meaning, and style. The use of formal analysis, formal elements and visual and aesthetic qualities builds a foundation upon which a knowledgeable artist or critic forms an opinion about a piece.
Normally sighted people think of visual literacy as the way in which we interpret and decode meaning in advertising, signage, art, and so on. What this course in visual literacy has taught me, is that the term “Visual Literacy” can be altered depending on the persons individual sense of vision. James Elkins comes the closest to the best description of visual literacy, “Understanding how people perceive objects. Interpret what they see and what they learn from them.”
What happens when the artist or viewer has a different sense of vision. Looking at three different cases in Oliver Sacks An Anthropologist on Mars; Seven Paradoxical Tales, “The Case of the Color...
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... and painting with fresco.
Visual literacy is not just about what we see but what is perceived. There are many art critics who will discredit work that they themselves could not create. It is not even the thought that really counts, cases like Stephen prove this. So then how do we define an artist or art? It is merely the intent. To be visually literate means to use the visual world the is around “you” to create. Whether you is autistic, colorblind or “normal”.
References
Elkins, J (2010) The concept of visual literacy, and its limitations, in: Visual literacy. New York, New York: Routledge. (217)
Sacks, O. (1995) An anthropologist on mars: Seven paradoxical tales. New York, New York: Vintage Books. (3-41,107-152,188 - 243)
Visual Literacy. (2011 February, 22) . Retrieved June 5, 2011 from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_literacy
We are constantly being bombarded with visual culture throughout every hour of the day, though at times it may seem overwhelming and desensitizing, it is only getting more prevalent. Paul Duncum is an art educator who is corporating these aspects of visual culture in the classroom everyday and also teaching his students to do this as well. I have talked about Paul Duncum educational history, his contributions to art education, his teaching philosophy, and how I can use his beliefs and teachings in my future as an art educator. With my new found knowledge of Paul Duncum and his teaches, I hope, as a future educator to follow in his footsteps of incorporation of our society’s importance of visual art in my classroom.
. . .vision is primarily the domain of science and the history of science, whereas visuality belongs to the humanities or social sciences because its effects, contexts, values, and intentions are socially constructed. These are to be found in diverse sources: literary, religious, political, philosophical, and, it should be emphasized, artistic.
Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. Sage Publications (CA), 2001. Print.
Visual-Verbal: whether people prefer to take in and process information visually or by other means;
Rose, G (2001) Visual Methodologies, An introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials London: Sage Publications
Literacy is the ability to read and write and use written information and to write appropriately in a range of contexts. It also involves the integration of speaking, listening, viewing and critical thinking with reading and writing, and includes the cultural knowledge which enables a speaker, writer or reader to recognise and use language appropriate to different social situations (Freebody & Luke, 1990).
Visual perceptions are supposed to have two sorts of content. First, they have intentional content which relates them as representations to the external world. The properties that constitute the intentional content are called representational or intentional qualities. Second, visual perce...
Many people look at a piece of art and add their own interpretations or meanings to it before they read the title or learn the backstory. The way we see things is damaged by our knowledge and beliefs. When a picture is zoomed in or focused on a certain part, the whole painting’s meaning is taken out of context. Words and titles surrounding the painting change the meaning and interpretation of the painting. In essay four of his book, Ways of Seeing, John Berger presents to us a collage of art that have no relevance to each other, so that we can give our own opinion without interruption that the titles and words give us.
Religious art as a narrative form was highly important due to the fact that most people during Medieval Europe did not know how to read or write. It is difficult to say the percentage of people who were illiterate due to the disagreement in the simple definition of literacy, which according to Cambridge Dictionaries online, is defined as: “the ability to read and write” or “ knowledge of a particular subject or a particular type of knowledge”. However, scholars have separated literacy into two categories: functional and scholarly. Functional literacy is a person learning to write their name so that they may sign documents, but not knowing what the shapes of the letters mean. This serves the main purpose of carrying out simple every day tasks
Visual and verbal thinkers; a visual thinker is someone who uses pictures to think, and verbal thinkers think in words. If you were to look up the definition of visual thinking, the first thing that would pop up as an answer is; refers to a group of generative skills that, when practiced with rigorous discipline, results in the production of novel and original ideas. By seeking to discover visual forms that fit his/her underlying human experience, the student of visual thinking comes to know the world. Those last two sentences were pretty confusing, so in order to help understand it more I kept looking for something easier; to receive more of a view on visual thinking . It was already clear that a visual thinker thinks in pictures, but needing something more descriptive, I continued to find articles and the quotes within them. What I found is interpreted thought out this essay.
Art is intended for all to enjoy and learn from. Through an art curriculum; phonics, mathematics, and readiness skills to name a few can be learned through an art curriculum. With this curriculum a teacher can adapt that centers to teach those with diverse abilities such as emotional and intellectual challenges, visual impairments, hearing impairments, and orthopedic impairments.
There is saying that art is not what you see but what
Pink, S. (2006). Engaging the Visual: An Introduction. In, Pink, S., The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses. Routledge: New York, pp. 3-20.
Visual Communication could be described as processes that rely primarily on rich visual content as the means of conveying information through words, photos, colors, shapes, and many other components. However, visual communication explores the use of graphical components in achieving communication goals. Visual communication has both critical and practical parts. According to the current book we use in the class “Visual Communication, Images with Messages”, the critical part of visual communication is known as visual rhetoric, which explores the way that designers use visual elements to influence audiences.
Art can be defined in many ways by an individual. One can say that any creative output by a person is considered art. Others contend that art must conform to a societal standard and the basis of the creation should be understood by most intellectual people. For example, some contend that computer-generated images, such as fractals, are not art due to the large role played by a computer. E.O. Wilson states “the exclusive role of the arts is to intensify aesthetic and emotional response. Works of art communicate feeling directly from mind to mind, with no intent to explain why the impact occurs” (218). A simple definition may be that art is the physical expression of the ideals formed by the mind.