How do I do a visual/formal analysis of a painting for an exam?

‘Formal’ or visual analysis of an artwork involves two joint aspects which are very closely linked: one is looking at the painting and pulling apart and describing the different visual elements that make it up, and another, closely related to this, is interpretation of how these aspects work to create its meaning.

Interpretation has to be closely based on what you can see (backed up by what you observe in the painting), and observing the artwork and describing it isn’t usually pure/disconnected/random description, but is description that helps to lead to the meanings the work might have.

I’m going to talk about things that hopefully will help in answering the sort of question you’re given in an exam where you get given an image to talk about, but the general principles of looking in an analytical way are useful elsewhere as well.

It is sometimes hard to be confident in our own perceptions. When looking at a work of art, it's easy to freeze up. If you give yourself permission to be confident in your thoughts, it's easier to write a good response. If you believe your thoughts are good, you are able to build on them more. What has helped me is to look at the painting in an open and calm way, to look carefully at the different visual choices the artist has made, without getting down on myself about my thoughts and ideas. The main thing is to look carefully and to have the confidence to say what you see and how it contributes to the effect of the painting.

Another problem I have had with analysing a painting is related to this ‘freezing up’. Sometimes, when a teacher explains afterwards for example what kinds of things we might have observed, I think, oh, how could I have not noticed that? Somehow, especially in an exam but even at home when looking at an image, we might miss things. I think this might be due to a feeling of nervousness about looking ‘properly’, or finding the right things, but ‘looking’ is hard in general (looking at an image is much more of a complex thing than it’s seen to be, I think). What has helped me is loosening up a lot, and trusting myself to come up with something, therefore allowing myself to look more and think more. Slowing down a bit when looking at the image also helped  -  when looking at things, often the brain leaps to make its connections, and sees the image as a whole more easily than seeing how the image made up and what the image is doing. By slowing down and not allowing the brain to take things for granted, you can analyse more easily. Rather than letting the brain see the image as a whole and blank out things it takes to be peripheral, slowing down enables you to be more analytical and tease those things apart that make up the final ‘whole’.

Visual analysis seems to include two aspects: looking and interpreting.

Formal analysis/visual analysis is especially relevant for Unit 1 ‘Visual Analysis and Interpretation’ in AQA History of Art. This unit’s questions ask you for:

‘a description/analysis of the formal features of the work, and/or the subject/theme/building type (describe, analyse, identify, examine, etc)’, and…

‘a discussion/interpretation of the work based on the description/analysis (discuss, interpret, explain, consider, account for, comment on, evaluate, etc)’

To analyse a work of art, a good way to start is to look at the different ‘elements’ that make up the work of art – all different visual choices the artist has made. Though these elements are so interwoven and essential to each other in a work of art that it might feel strange to separate them out, looking at them separately is not to say that they are themselves separate, but is just a way to start analysing the artwork and breaking down how it works. The ‘formal analysis toolbox’ for painting (in Thinking About Art: A Thematic Guide to Art History by Penny Huntsman – p9) gives a list of 8 areas you can think about in an analysis. These are: composition, colour, pictorial space, light and tone, form, line, scale, and pattern/ornamentation/decoration.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dXniCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=formal+analysis+toolbox+aqa+art+history&source=bl&ots=Ok-w41gBPu&sig=tmNuJneu2UdV1wroO6izDluU52Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwikmYOq84HKAhVCfRoKHX2KDH8Q6AEIMzAD#v=onepage&q=formal%20analysis%20toolbox%20aqa%20art%20history&f=false (Click and scroll down one page) This is a link to the pages where the toolbox is shown in the book on google books. They contain more in depth explanations of the 8 general areas, and have lots of useful questions you can ask yourself in relation to each of them.

One thing I wanted to mention is that (at least in paintings which refer in any way to real life) what the artist has chosen to put in and how is also important in contributing to the way the theme/thing/idea is being depicted, working with the formal elements listed above. For example one past AQA unit 1 question was: ‘Analyse the figure and the setting in this portrait and discuss the representation of the sitter’s gender’ - on the painting ‘Madame de Pompadour at her Tambour frame’ by François-Hubert Drouais 1763-64. Another was:  ‘Discuss the figures and animals and their setting in this painting and analyse the artist’s treatment of light and space’ – on the painting ‘A Distant View of Dordrecht, with a Milkmaid and Four Cows, and Other Figures (‘The Large Dort’)’ by Aelbert Cuyp, c.1650.

Questions that I could ask in relation to what is actually being depicted are: Where in the image are the figure(s) depicted? How do the figures fit into their setting? What aspects of a landscape does the artist include? What about the figures does the artist emphasise? What are the subjects doing? How are the formal elements discussed above, such as colour and form, used in relation to the subject? We can observe things both about the way the picture is done (the formal elements used to depict what is represented) and about the choices the artist has made in what they have chosen to depict (setting and figures – clothing, interactions between figures, gestures, expressions, objects, how the figure is set in the scene, etc – scale also plays a part in this, as well as other formal elements).  The two are linked together, and formal visual choices are made in relation to what is being depicted. Both of these contribute to what the picture ‘does’ overall.

The way the artist creates the artwork is connected with what they are trying to depict overall (the theme, or the general ‘subject’, the ideas).  The AQA Scheme of Work says that this describing (looking, analysing, examining, identifying features etc) of a work of art such as a painting involves ‘describing its formal features in relation to the subject or theme’.

As an example,  I am looking at Monet’s ‘The Pont de l’Europe: Gare Saint-Lazare’. I have focused on composition here, but of course there are other important things to talk about too.

At the opening stage of looking at the picture, it might be hard to know what to say. Something which has helped me a lot is to just to sit and look at the image and think about what I see, and not to get bogged down in thinking about what I should be seeing.

In this painting, the composition feels very unusual. This can be off-putting because it means I don’t know how to describe it. I think it is important not to let this make you think you can’t do it, or that this is a failing on your part – in this case this is partly due to it being a deliberately challenging composition.

One thing I’ve noticed is that there are strong diagonal ‘lines’ of recession into space in the painting which travel in different directions. The lines on the ground level of the train tracks travel in one direction into the painting, and the top of the houses follow this same direction of recession  in the way they recede in perspective in a diagonal from the upper-left of the painting down towards the right hand side. Another ‘line’ of recession is created by the bridge on the right and the recession of the houses from the right down in a leftwards direction. It’s interesting how intense these diagonal lines are (due to the steepness of the angles in comparison to each other, and the way they’re seen together due to the viewpoint the artist has chosen, and due to the emphasis given by the repetition of the train tracks in one direction and the heaviness of the railway bridge in the other) and the and how they lead your eye in different directions.

I thought that it was interesting how the buildings at the back of the painting are cut off so strongly from the front part of the painting, by the railway bridge and the big wall. The diagonal bridge that recedes so strongly and pulls you into the painting, suddenly stops at the wall in the middle ground, and that strong recession is suddenly cut. This starts to bring the subject of the painting into things (railway wall vs. large buildings in the background). This is also linked with colour and tone because of the way things like colour and tone work with the composition (ie. the dark-ness of the railway walls and the front part of the composition vs. the pale colours of the background buildings).

Another aspect of composition I could think about would be the way the viewer is positioned in relationship with what is in the painting: where you are located (in the railway part).

I could think about whether the way the picture is arranged creates a feeling that there is a space outside what is depicted, and in what way. In this painting, I could talk about the way that the train is half cut off by the edge of the painting, so it doesn’t seem traditionally ‘composed’, but rather seems a bit more casual, as if it was a moment of real sight. I could talk about the way the steam/smoke seems to float ‘off-scene’. Or the way that we are seeing a picture with a strong diagonal of the bridge on the right that doesn’t seem to be introduced in the normal way, so it seems to maybe progress out of the edge of the picture.

So with these thoughts about the composition itself, I can then come up with the interpretation part of the visual analysis, connecting my observations to what effect they create, what meaning they have, or why the artist might have used these strategies. The AQA explanation of the schemes of work says about the visual analysis/interpretation unit (unit 1): ‘While important, description alone is limited in its value and candidates should be able to discuss, interpret, explain, consider, account for and comment on, and evaluate the formal visual features, subjects and themes in painting and sculpture, and the features, building types and functions of architecture. They will, in part, be assessed on their ability to do this.’

In thinking about the composition of this Monet painting, I could start to talk about how the compositional elements I have identified give a sense of the scene being dynamic and unstable, for example. I could pick up on and make some interpretations based on the way that the composition has lines that recede in dramatically different directions, for instance, (which I mentioned above when thinking just about what I could see in the painting). What does this do?  Why did the artist do this? If you have these lines going in such different directions, your eye will be pulled down different directions.  You wouldn’t be entirely certain where to rest your eyes or where the painting wanted you to look. Having two places you might end up (to the right under the bridge and towards the left in the distance where the buildings recede to) could mean that you aren’t settled when looking at the picture and can’t look at the picture in a traditional way, and that it is a picture that is challenging for the viewer. I think it creates a dynamic effect, partly because these lines are so intense, especially the steep-angled and very solid effect (bringing in colour/tone again) of the bridge.

This is just an example of how I might approach a ‘visual analysis’/’interpretation’ from the composition angle.

There are different ways you could structure it in an exam; what seems to be important is that you include what you see in the picture, and your interpretations of this, and that having this within a clear and simple structure will ensure that you get the marks you deserve for the way you’ve communicated it.

The exam questions tend to ask for focus on specific elements, such as asking you to look at ‘light and space’ and ‘figures in their setting’, so this gives you the elements to focus on. Past comments from examiners tend to say that it’s important that students got a good balance between the different areas that the question specified. They also said that something that caused students to get lower marks was if they began to write a lot about things that don’t get linked back to the main things the question asked. Comments also mentioned that students who got higher marks tended to link their interpretations closely to what they saw in the image, rather than speculations that weren’t closely linked to visual observation.

In an exam, I would recommend first looking at the photo you're given of the work of art and just looking and thinking, both about what you can see, and what these visual aspects do, and about how you could fit these thoughts into a structure. I know teachers often say this, but I think even just a few minutes of thinking it through can be so helpful (at least, it has been a big revelation for me in doing exams – if I give myself even a small amount of time to think it through, this lets me express my thoughts more clearly and not in such a panic). However, I know different things work for different people, and you know best as to what works best for you in using your time.

I know that visual analysis isn’t just for exams -or even academic stuff in general- but I’ve focused on these as I know exams are where people get their marks (at least in AQA’s History of Art). Hopefully this will also help when you need to look carefully at artworks/architecture for other reasons in History of Art, or will be helpful in History of Art exams that don’t have specific ‘visual analysis’  type questions, but where you still are selecting artworks as evidence and talking about their visual qualities as part of your essay (I think that the ‘formal analysis toolbox’ could be especially helpful for use in other sorts of questions).