December 2017
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
3h 39m
English
Distorting a form, a face, or space itself is one of the most dramatic and powerful statements an artist can make.
• Facial distortion. In much tribal art, images of the human head are subject to gross distortions.
• Figural distortion. Byzantine artists routinely elongated figures to create a sense of presence. The Cretan artist El Greco (1541–1614) borrowed from this tradition, bringing the power of elongated forms into Spanish painting with highly expressive effect. The German Expressionist painters of the twentieth century often brutally distorted figures.
• Spatial distortion. Perspectival space can be distorted or skewed by adjusting the geometry to create surprising or alarming shifts in space.
• Distortion as style. Some ...