HISTORY OF GRAPHICS READING ASSIGNMENT

TRADITIONAL VS. DIGITAL Since the first cave paintings, art has progressed significantly. Artists are now accustomed to using digital forms of art to communicate their feelings, thoughts, creativity, and ideas to others. Digital art is defined as art done with digitally coded information and instruments such as computers. All creative genres have the goal of capturing the composer's message, ideas, or feelings and displaying them for others or themselves to appreciate. Digital paintings, meanwhile, are a means for artists to express their emotions and can be called an art form. Many subcategories of digital art exist, including digital paintings, pictures, movies, and animations. Traditional art, as opposed to digital art, is created using more physical traditional media such as pencils, charcoal, oil paintings, clay, and so on. This style of art has been around for centuries, even before the invention of modern media, and it continues to be popular now. The seven types of fine arts are considered traditional art forms. Drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, cinema, music, and theatre are examples of fine arts. The majority of these classic forms of art can now be recreated digitally or through other means. The physical presence of traditional art distinguishes it from digital art forms. Historical Artists in Painting, Graphics Design, and Photography FAMOUS PAINTERS Vincent van Gogh was a Dutch painter, generally considered to be the greatest after Rembrandt van Rijn, and one of the greatest of the Post-Impressionists. He sold only one artwork during his life, but in the century after his death he became perhaps the most recognized painter of all time. Leonardo da Vinci, Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. His Last Supper (1495–98) and Mona Lisa are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of their time. Claude Monet, in full Oscar-Claude Monet, French painter who was the initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. In his mature works, Monet developed his method of producing repeated studies of the same motif in series, changing canvases with the light or as his interest shifted. These series were frequently exhibited in groups—for example, his images of haystacks (1890/91) and the Rouen cathedral (1894). At his home in Giverny, Monet created the water-lily pond that served as inspiration for his last series of paintings. His popularity soared in the second half of the 20th century, when his works traveled the world in museum exhibitions that attracted record-breaking crowds and marketed popular commercial items featuring imagery from his art. FAMOUS GRAPHIC DESIGNERS Saul Bass, American graphic designer and filmmaker who introduced a new art form with his imaginative film title sequences that conveyed the essence of a movie and prepared audiences for what they were about to see. Bass was a creative child who enjoyed drawing. After completing high school, he studied at the Art Students League in New York City and later attended Brooklyn College, where he was taught by the notable designer Gyorgy Kepes. He worked as an advertising designer before moving to Los Angeles in 1946. David Carson, American graphic designer, whose unconventional style revolutionized visual communication in the 1990s. Carson came to graphic design relatively late in life. He was a competitive surfer—ranked eighth in the world—and a California high-school teacher when, at age 26, he enrolled in a two-week commercial design class. Discovering a new calling, he briefly enrolled at a commercial art school before working as a designer at a small surfer magazine, Self and Musician. He then spent four years as a part-time designer for the magazine Transworld Skateboarding, which enabled him to experiment. His characteristic chaotic spreads with overlapped photos and mixed and altered type fonts drew both admirers and detractors. Photographer Albert Watson, for example, declared, “He uses type the way a painter uses paint, to create emotion, to express ideas.” Others felt that the fractured presentation obscured the message it carried. Milton Glaser, American graphic designer, illustrator, and cofounder of the revolutionary Pushpin Studio. Glaser graduated from Cooper Union in New York City in 1951 and studied printmaking with Giorgio Morandi in Italy in 1952–53. Glaser founded the graphic design firm Pushpin Studio in New York with Seymour Chwast, Reynold Ruffins, and Edward Sorel in 1954. At this time photography and television were radically altering the visual-communications industry, and naturalistic illustration was declining from its position as the dominant mass-media imaging technique. Glaser and the Pushpin artists drew upon their childhood love of comic books, an understanding of modern art gleaned from their student days, and the art of non-Western cultures to forge an innovative conceptual approach to graphic design. Eschewing traditional narrative techniques, these artists’ work expressed ideas about the subject through simplified images that functioned as signs and symbols. FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHERS Dorothea Lange, American documentary photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary and journalistic photography. Lange studied photography at Columbia University in New York City under Clarence H. White, a member of the Photo-Secession group. In 1918 she decided to travel around the world, earning money as she went by selling her photographs. Her money ran out by the time she got to San Francisco, so she settled there and obtained a job in a photography studio. Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer whose humane, spontaneous photographs helped establish photojournalism as an art form. His theory that photography can capture the meaning beneath outward appearance in instants of extraordinary clarity is perhaps best expressed in his book Images à la sauvette (1952; The Decisive Moment). Cartier-Bresson was born and attended school in a village not far from Paris. In 1927–28 he studied in Paris with André Lhote, an artist and critic associated with the Cubist movement. Lhote implanted in him a lifelong interest in painting, a crucial factor in the education of his vision. In 1929 Cartier-Bresson went to the University of Cambridge, where he studied literature and painting. Ansel Adams, American photographer who was the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century. He is also perhaps the most widely known and beloved photographer in the history of the United States; the popularity of his work has only increased since his death. Adams’s most important work was devoted to what was or appeared to be the country’s remaining fragments of untouched wilderness, especially in national parks and other protected areas of the American West. He was also a vigorous and outspoken leader of the conservation movement. SOURCES https://www.eden-gallery.com/news/traditional-art-vs-digital-art#:~:text=As%20opposed%20to%20digital%20art,widely%20popular%20to%20this%20day. https://www.britannica.com/