An artist is someone involved in an artistic activity concerned with making art, practicing his/her arts, or showing an artistic art. The word ‘artist’ can refer to any of these. The common use in academic discussion and everyday speech refers only to a single practitioner in the visual arts. In technical use, however, the term refers to any one who practices or exhibits the visual arts. The visual arts include painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, television production, and opera.
Many artists, in addition to being painters, sculptors, or sculpture makers, are also authors. A medium by which they communicate their works is calligraphy. There are many styles of this craft in which Dutch landscape and artist expressionism are the most common examples.
Landscape painting is the art of preparing the scenes on which paintings are made. It is a subset of fine art that involves both creation and commissioning of work of other kinds. Within the field of landscape paintings there are abstract or representational as well as horticultural and floral paintings. Abstract paintings include figures, forms, and landscapes. They may be simple or complex, for example, or take the form of an entire landscape. Horticultural paintings deal with plants and the landscape around them.
Painting has been a long-established discipline dating back at least to prehistoric times. Paintings, in general, have three different kinds of content: (a) representational; (b) inspirational or motivatory; (c) aesthetic beauty. Modern artists continue to develop these disciplines, developing newer ones as each group experiments with new ways of portraying beauty and inspiration in the world around us. While there are artists within each of these categories, most contemporary artists have blended the genres into something new, and have produced paintings that are appreciated across the board.
The term “art” is used broadly to refer to any work of visual art that makes you think and creates an emotional response. If you look at the history of Western art, you’ll see that it has always included elements from many other disciplines, including music, literature, drama, dance, architecture, sculpture, photography, and printmaking. In recent years, however, art scholars have begun to focus more on the term “art” as a singular term, and to ask questions like, What is art? Who are the people behind the art? How do we understand beauty?
One of the keys to understanding the value of art is appreciation for its medium. A work of art may be in a form of music, literature, film, sculpture, or print. These things do not necessarily need to exist in the same physical form in order to be appreciated. Instead, appreciation arises from the ability to perceive the relationship between the art and the person who created it. This is what makes art so different from any other human endeavor.
