Emily Carr at Home and at Work

Visual Arts Glossary

Abstract: An image that reduces a subject to its essential visual elements, such as lines, shapes, and colours.
Acrylic: A painting medium that uses pigment in a synthetic base.
Architecture: The profession of designing buildings, open areas, communities, etc., usually with regard to the character or style of building.
Arts and Crafts Movement: A late-nineteenth-century design movement centered in England that developed in reaction to the influence of Industrialization. Its supporters promoted the return to hand craftmanship.
Background: Those portions or areas of composition that are back of the primary or dominant subject matter or design areas.
Balance: A principle of art and design concerned with the arrangement of one or more elements in a work of art so that they appear symmetrical or asymmetrical in design and proportion.
Collage: An image created by gluing materials such as paper scraps, photographs, and cloth to a flat surface.
Colour: An element of art and design that pertains to a particular hue. One or any mixture of pigments seen when light is reflected off a surface.
Complementary colors: Those pairs of colors, such as red and green, that together embrace the entire spectrum. The complement of one of the three primary colors is a mixture of the other two. In pigments, they produce a neutral grey when mixed in the right proportions.
Composition: The arrangement of form, colour, line, space, and mass in a work of art.
Computer graphics: Medium developed during the 1960s and 1970s that uses computer programs and electronic light to make designs and images on the surface of a computer or television screen.
Cool color: Blue, green, or blue-violet. Psychologically, cool colors are calming, depressive; optically, they generally appear to recede.

Cubism: An influential, 20th-century style developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, based on the simultaneous presentation of multiple points of view.
Design: An organized arrangement of one or more visual elements, principles or materials for a purpose.
Drawing: Sketch, design, or representation by lines. Drawings are usually made on paper with pen, pencil, charcoal, pastel, chalk, and the like.
Earth Colors: Pigments, such as yellow ochre and umber, that are obtained by mining: usually compounds of metals.
Form: An element of art and design that pertains to an actual or implied 3-D shape of an object or image. In a broader sense, form refers to the total physical characteristics of an object, event or situation.
Gallery: A room, series of rooms, or building devoted to the exhibition and often the sale of works of art.
Graphics: Collective term for printmaking processes such as photography, silk-screening, monoprinting, and lift printing.
Historic site: a place that is pertaining to, or characteristic of history or past events.
Illustration: A picture designed to elucidate and decorate a story, poem, or other piece of writing.
Impressionism: An art style developed in the 19th century, characterized by broken colour and soft edges.
Landscape: A view of the scenery on land, often used as subject matter in art.
Layouts: Sketches of rough ideas or compositional plans for a work of art.
Line: An element of art and design that pertains to the narrow mark or path of a moving point on a surface.
Medium: The material with which an artist works, such as marble, oil paint, terra-cotta, and watercolour.
Mosaic: A picture composed of many small, separate pieces of materials such as clay, glass, marble, and paper, which are fastened to a background.
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Emily Carr: At Home and At Work - a compendium of the life & work of Emily Carr, Canadian artist and author.Questions or comments: Jennifer Iredale, Curator - Jennifer.Iredale@gems4.gov.bc.ca

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Last updated: 31 July 1998
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