Teachers Lesson Plans
Canadian Painting in the Thirties
- Abstract , Abstraction
- Definition: In art, the word "abstract" designates a work that does not represent the world as we see it in reality. Abstract art is a 20th-century artistic trend that sees the artist discarding the depiction of real objects in nature, and favouring the use of formal patterns of shapes, lines, colour and texture. It is also known as non-representational art.
- Cool Colour
- Definition: The cool colours are rather bluish in colour and on the chromatic wheel range from violet to green.
- Fauves
- Definition: The name given to a circle of artists who worked in France from 1905 to about 1910. Matisse, Derain, Braque, Dufy, Rouault and Vlaminck were les fauves - the wild beasts. In their paintings they worked with loud colours and wild brushwork. The critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term when their work was shown for the first time at the Salon d'automne in Paris in 1905.
© Estate of André Derain / ADAGP (Paris) / SODRAC (Montréal)
- Hue
- Definition: The colour as it is found on the colour wheel. Words such as red, blue-green or mauve define the tint of a given colour.
- Modern, Modernism
- Definition: Modernism refers to the new art prevalent in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when artists wanted to distance themselves from the styles of the past, and instead use innovative forms of expression.
© The Humphrey Estate - Pointillist
- Definition: A postimpressionist school of painting exemplified by Georges Seurat and his followers in late 19th-century France, characterized by the application of paint in small dots and brush strokes.
- Precisionist
- Definition: A style of early 20th-century painting in which depicted scenes or objects are reduced or simplified to elemental structural forms and rendered by a combination of abstraction and realism.
© The Georgia O'Keeffe Foundation
- Primary Colour
- Definition: The primary colours are the three base colours: red, yellow and blue. These colours cannot be created by mixing.
- Self-portrait
- Definition: A portrait that an artist paints of himself or herself or a work of art showing the person who made it.
- Tertiary colour
- Definition: A tertiary colour consists of a mixture of a primary colour and a secondary colour: for example, a blue/ violet is created by mixing the primary colour blue with the secondary colour, violet.
- Theosophy
- Definition: Denotes metaphysical teachings and systems, derived from personal experience and esoteric tradition, which base knowledge of nature and the human condition upon knowledge of the divine nature or spiritual powers. The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 (exh. cat. by M. Tuchman and others, 1986)
© Family of Lawren S. Harris - Value
- Definition: The value of a colour depends on the degree of lightness or darkness of a colour.
- Warm Colour
- Definition: In a warm colour, the red and the yellow predominate. On the chromatic circle, the yellow, red and orange are warm colours.
