What is art?

What art is

What is art? Today an artificial intelligence can paint a picture in seconds. And yet, almost every adult says they can't even draw a straight line. So why make art yourself? In the next few minutes you'll see what visual art is, how it has changed from caves to screens, how to look at it and how to start making it, and you'll walk away with a plan to start creating today.

By the way, this is my house in MindHaOS, and in my Art Studio I paint at my easel and keep my drawings in a gallery. And take a look at the house: today it's a medieval castle, and with every part it's going to move forward in time, era by era, all the way to the future. Let's get started.

There are lots of definitions, but almost all of them agree on one thing: art is something one person makes so that someone else will look at it, feel it or think about it. In 1897, the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy put it this way: art is passing on to others a feeling you have lived.

This guide is about the visual arts, the ones you look at: drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and, today, digital illustration. They all work with the same things: lines, shapes, light and color.

So why do it, if an artificial intelligence can already paint in seconds? Because the value of art isn't only in the result, but in what happens to you while you make it. In 2016, at Drexel University in the United States, Girija Kaimal measured cortisol, the stress hormone, before and after forty-five minutes of making art: it dropped in three out of four people, whether they could draw or not.

And it helps you think: in 2016, at the University of Waterloo in Canada, students remembered the words they had drawn much better than the ones they had only written down. A machine can make the image for you, but it can't look, think or feel for you.

And what about talent? As kids we all draw without fear, and around age ten a lot of us quit because the drawing doesn't look like the real thing. But researchers Rebecca Chamberlain and Johan Wagemans found that most mistakes come from how we look, not from the hand. And looking can be trained.

Look at the house: it's a medieval castle, from the age when almost all art was painted for churches and palaces, and very few people got to make it. Today, to get started, all you need is a pencil and paper, or a tablet.

A brief history of visual art

We've been making art since long before we could write. In a cave on the island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, there's a scene of people next to a wild pig painted at least fifty-one thousand years ago. And at Lascaux, in France, the horses and bulls on the walls are about seventeen thousand years old.

For centuries, figures were painted flat. Around 1415, in Florence, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi used a mirror to show how depth is seen, and in 1435 Leon Battista Alberti explained it in a book for painters: that was the birth of Renaissance perspective.

Look: the house has moved forward in time and now it's a ship, like in the age when Europe was crossing the oceans. In 1525, the German artist Albrecht Dürer published a manual with a grid for copying what you see, square by square.

In 1839, photography was unveiled in Paris. Many people thought painting was going to disappear, and the opposite happened: painters stopped copying reality in every detail and went out looking for light and color. In 1874, the Impressionists held their first exhibition.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp sent a porcelain urinal to an exhibition in New York, signed with a fake name, and called it «Fountain». It was rejected, but it left behind the big question of modern art: is it art because it's well made, or because someone chooses it and asks you to look at it?

And in 1963, Ivan Sutherland created Sketchpad, the first program for drawing on a screen. That's where tablets come from, and today, artificial intelligence. The tool changes; the question of what we want to say is still ours.

The elements of a work

Every visual work, from a cave to a screen, is built from the same elements: line, shape, value, which is light and dark, color, texture and space. And almost everything you see can be built from four forms: the cube, the sphere, the cylinder and the cone.

Light is what gives volume. An object looks three-dimensional thanks to its values: the light, the halftones, the form shadow, the reflected light and the cast shadow. Squint your eyes: the details disappear and you're left with just the patches of light and shadow.

Color has its own history: Isaac Newton arranged the colors in a circle in 1704. But a color works mostly through its value: if a work looks good in black and white, it will look good in color.

And there's composition: how everything is laid out in the frame. A classic trick of painters and photographers is the rule of thirds: divide the image into three by three and put what matters on one of the crossings, not right in the center.

And now the house is in the Wild West, in the nineteenth century, the age of photography: that's why everything looks sepia. For proportions, painters measure: arm straight out, one unit with the pencil, and compare.

How to look at a work

How long do you look at a painting? In 2001, Jeffrey Smith and Lisa Smith watched visitors at the Metropolitan Museum in New York: on average, they spent about twenty-seven seconds in front of each work, less than it takes to read its label.

And looking well is hard. These two tables look like very different sizes, right? They're identical: the illusion was drawn by the psychologist Roger Shepard in 1990. Your brain corrects what it sees based on what it knows. Tap here and check for yourself.

To look slowly, the educator Edmund Feldman proposed four steps in 1970: describe what you see, analyze how it was made, interpret what it means and, only at the end, decide whether you like it.

And now the house is a train: we've reached the industrial age, when art left the palaces for the streets, the posters and the newspapers. Try it today: pick just one work, in a museum or on your phone, and look at it for ten minutes.

How to start making art

To draw what you see and not what you know, there's a famous exercise from Betty Edwards's 1979 book: copy a drawing turned upside down. Since you don't recognize what it is, you stop drawing symbols and copy lines and angles.

Where do the eyes go on a face? Almost everyone draws them too high. In fact they sit halfway down the head, between the chin and the top of the head. Move the eye line here and see for yourself.

Do quick gesture drawings: from thirty seconds to two minutes, just the movement, no details. They force you to see what matters and take away the fear of getting it wrong.

Copy the masters. The Louvre Museum has let people copy its paintings ever since it opened, in 1793. Copying teaches you how others solved the very thing you're struggling with.

And keep a sketchbook: draw whatever's in front of you, your mug, your shoes, the people in a waiting room. Quantity matters more than perfection: your first hundred drawings are for learning.

Look: the house has reached the digital age, with neon and screens everywhere. I do it in my Art Studio in MindHaOS: I paint in layers, use the grid and the mirror, and every piece stays in my gallery.

Your plan to get started

Set yourself a small, concrete goal: for example, a hundred drawings in a hundred days. A goal you can count keeps you coming back every day.

You don't need much time: fifteen minutes a day adds up to more than ninety hours a year. Move your minutes here and see how many pieces you'd have in a year.

A possible week: Monday, contours; Tuesday, forms; Wednesday, quick gestures; Thursday, light and shadow; Friday, look at a work for ten minutes and copy it; and the weekend, whatever you like.

And the house has reached the future: it's a spaceship. The tools will keep changing, but art will always need someone who looks and who feels. So show your work: to a friend, in a class or online.

To sum up: art is making something so someone else will look at it and feel it; it's worth it for what happens to you while you create; look slowly, with light, form and color; and create a little every day.

If you want to start creating the way I do, the Art Studio in MindHaOS has a gallery for your work, a layered canvas that saves itself, and drawing aids like the grid and the mirror. The link is in the description, along with this interactive guide. See you in the next one.