Article written by Caitlyn Saliba.
To some, art is as essential as breathing. These people are lucky, because art is literally everywhere we look, from the buildings around us to the label on that energy drink can you just smashed down because it’s final assessment season (am I right?). In other words, from architecture to the graphic design that goes into labelling and advertising. And that’s just visual arts, if we want to look deeper we can talk about every TV show, movie, Youtube clip that the art of film has produced. Not to mention music and fashion design.
So from the clothes on your back to the building you’re probably sitting in right now, it’s all some kind of art right? Literally everything we see is some kind of art form. Right now you’re probably thinking “but what about parks and nature?”, well, those natural things may not be an art form exactly, but they do play a large part in the form of inspiration.
But let’s track back to visual arts here, there are so many forms of visual art, as mentioned above, we have fashion design, architecture, graphic design, painting and drawing. All of these things can be seen in everyday life. Try walking down the streets of some place in Logan, just south of Brisbane City, you’re guaranteed to see some form of graffiti (painting) or murals painted on the walls of train stations such as Woodridge.
Every ad you’ve ever seen, okay think about this, whether it be on Facebook, billboards, banners at your local university or school, posters strung around the city for events, all of these things have been graphically designed in some way right? Things don’t just come together without the thought of space, colour, font and pictures. This is what graphic design does, it brings all these things together to get the finished project that is eye catching and interesting.
As for everything else, there’s a huge amount of art that goes into making everyday life happen. Without the art form of film we wouldn’t be watching TV, Netflix, movies or anything. We wouldn’t have Youtube either. None of these things could exist for our entertainment without the background artists such as directors, actors, camera crew, hair and makeup, or even the sound workers.
An easy one to pick out is Instagram. Instagram is full of photography, that’s literally its use, but for those of us that follow pages for people such as writers, a lot of their work is graphically designed, take for example literally anything on Instagram that isn’t a picture, so text with a fancy background, that’s graphic design.
Architecture may not seem like an art form, but when you look into how the buildings are actually designed and built, it definitely is. They have to draw out their designs, instant art form right there, but they also have to build models of what they want to pitch to the people looking to build it, art form number two, and then, finally the building is built, number three.
Fashion design is the same, they have to draw out their designs before digitally remastering and then finally making the clothing, whether this be by hand, usually for little boutique stores you may see hidden around the CBD, but also for mass production, usually for places like Kmart and Big W. either way, both these things are using many art forms to come to their desired outcome, whether that be the building, the clothing, the flyer, banner or poster and even the little ads we see on our phones from time to time.
To be fair, most of these art forms run in conjunction with other specialised knowledge, such as marketing, management, accountants and any kind of business really, but in the end they are all types of art that we see in our everyday life. If we go back to the example of graffiti and murals, these things are usually done in conjunction with the Logan or Brisbane City Council, whether that be to clean up these art works, or install them with help from the schools, these things are all important to our everyday lives. One more example if you are looking to see some more of these artworks, head on up to the Springwood Water Tower in Logan, the entire thing is covered in murals made by the local schools and it’s definitely worth checking it out.
So for this week, I’d like to encourage and challenge everyone to take a look around them and notice just how much art they can find. Start a list and add to it every time you see something that’s been created with the intention of self-expression. That is what art is all about in the end anyway. I think you’ll be genuinely surprised by just how much you can find.
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