The Art Elements "Line" and "Value" in black and white art

Welcome back!

Today we are going to look at two of the Elements of Art. They are line and value.  It is easy to tell them apart when you are working in color...and not as easy in some black and white art.

Cat and Bird by Paul Klee
1928; Oil and ink on canvas, 38 x 53 cm;
Museum of Modern Art, New York
http://www.moma.org

Composition VIII by Wassily Kandinsky
1923; Oil on canvas, 140 x 201 cm; 
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 
http://www.ibiblio.org



Above, you can see thick and thin straight and curving lines in black. There are also gray curved lines and shapes. On the right, the flowing lines around the cat change colors as they travel around the objects.
Value, or the lightness and darkness of colors, is easy to spot. See the different tones of brown in the cat? Those are values of brown. Kandinsky uses values of several colors. See if you can find light and medium blue, red and pink, and different values of purple in the picture above.

(Extra credit! Which painting is abstract? Answer at the end of this post!)

Sometimes in black and white art, it is more confusing to tell line and value apart. In these two examples, lines are also used to create value.
The lines in the puffin's feathers are close together on his back, and farther apart near his eye. In true black and white art, your eye mixes the black of the ink and the white of the paper together to make the gray values. Lines (or dots, in the case of the rocks and beak) that are packed together densely appear darker. Pixelation works the same way. Varying the spacing allows for a full range of gray. The dots make broken lines on the rocks as well.

Puffin by Robin-Jo Norris
1996; Ink on Illustration Board; 60 x 80 cm;
Collection of the artist.

The drawing of my cat Maxwell uses the same idea. However, this drawing is on rough, bumpy paper. If I covered  more bumps inside the lines of the cat's stripes, the darker the value appeared. Graphite means it is drawn in pencil, so really it is all values of gray. I hope I have cleared up this subject!

  

               Maxwell Kitty by Robin-Jo Norris
                     2008; Graphite on paper; 28 x 40 cm.;
            Collection of the artist.



*********The answer is: They are both abstract. Cat and Bird is an example of abstract representational art. "Representational" means that something recognizable is being shown by the artist.  Composition VIII is called non-objective or non-representational abstract art. " Non" means no, so this is art with no recognizable objects.

If you got this right, come in and tell me. It is worth 2 Extra Credit points!