Zoma's Art Teaching Experience

We had a great experience teaching Art, about an artwork. We will relate that experience in the following. The work was picked in the museum MoMA. It was entitled House by the Railroad, made in 1925 by the American Edward Hopper (1882-1967). The reason why this has been our choice will be treated further, because it was the object of a question asked by one of our students. Edward Hopper, as we has already studied one of his works, is known for his paintings evoking urban loneliness of the great cities of the 20^th century. This idea clearly appears again in this artwork at the first glance. The methodology for this assignment was to visit the museum MoMA, select an artwork, observe and analyze it, take notes and pictures, then process the notes and the reflection into bullet points, and teach someone about, and according to what had been studied in class about Art and artworks. We got two students to teach. The first was Asiyatou. She is a classmate in my Chemistry II class. The second was Steven, a friend and a student in Electrical major. The outline of our lecture was:

1- Definition of Art

2- Conditions of exposure of the artwork in the museum

3- Form, Type and Style of the artwork

4- Visual effects of the artwork: color, value, shading, lines, shape of spaces

To say it honestly, one of the most difficult things we found in this experience was to define Art. In our point of view, it would be inconvenient to start teaching someone about an artwork, without telling him what Art is. Our general idea about Art was an expression of beauty, a cultural expression, the expression of an artist’s vision, … But when we started searching about, we found it was not as easier as we thought and there was even a controversy between philosophers about the definition. So we were trying to avoid the definition in our presentation, but then we realized that the students could ask us that question. We finally decided to include it, and we formulated a visual definition based on the medium of Art. The definition we gave to our student was the following: “Art is an expression of an individual (artist) or a group (cultural) through a medium like painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, etc”.

In our second point, we chose to talk about the conditions of exposure of the artwork. Because the work was selected in a museum and was exposed in specific conditions we found it relevant to discuss about. In this section, we precised that works of art in museums are presented in an environment specified by the artist himself or chosen by the museum, and which can contribute to have an effect on the spectator. In this artwork the background was white but slightly dark because there was no direct light on the picture. The light was yellow, and was coming from the ceiling of the hallway, in parallel to the picture. The frame was a dark yellow wood. Definitely, this environment either it is purposely chosen or not, does participate in conveying the message of “lonely urban life” of the work designed in a monochromatic dark tone.

The third point of our discussion was straightforward. The form of an artwork is its medium: drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, etc. Our artwork House by the Railroad is a painting, an oil-on-canvas art. The style is the way the content is presented. It is representational when it presents the reality without distortion, and abstract when it does it with distortion. It is non-representational when the object is not real. The present artwork is representational. The type of an artwork is historical when it depicts an historical scene. It can be is portrait, portraying a human or non-human character. It can be landscape, representing landscapes. It is a genre artwork if it depicts ordinary scenes. This work of Edward Hopper is a genre painting. It denounces the type of life lived by his contemporaries, that was a lonely life in great cities. In this picture, the artist is presenting a big and apparently empty house, that may certainly be populated, but whose sign of animation seems to come only from the railroad.

In the fourth and last point, we defined the visuals elements as the technics used by the artist to give the sensation of space he desires, and to express his message. Concerning the color, the artist used an overall monochromatic blue tone. The blue is a cool color symbolizing luck of energy, sadness, as refer to the ambiance of this lonely environment. The monochromatic choice means monotony and solitude of such atmosphere. On the contrary, the author employed a red color (hot color) in two locations: the railroad and the chimney, as to mean that the animation of this place comes only from those locations, not from human interactions. The value and shading in this work is remarkable. The author deliberately projected the light from the back of the house, leaving the front of the building dark, with shadows. We know that the front of a building is its point of focus, and is even given much more architectural attention. It is the face of the edifice and its “smile”. But, Here Edward Hopper is showing a house with a dark face, without smile, to emphasize again the lonely life of those cities deprived of shininess and brightness. The lines used by the artist are amazingly straight for a painting. This is part of the style of the artist. We can observe this rectitude in the horizontal lines of the railroad, and the vertical lines of the building. Concerning the shape of the spaces, there is a duality characterized by a positive space formed by the house and the railroad and a negative space formed by the sky. This explicit choice of the artist is to reinforce the loneliness of this isolated house which has only for coexistence a railroad and the sky.

     At the end of our presentation, we ask our students if they had questions. We expected many questions, but only one question was asked by Asiyatou. She wanted to know what oriented us to our specific choice of this artwork among so many others in the museum. Our response was that we had studied an artwork of the same artist. We learned that the author was known for treating the topic of the urban individualist mode of life. So, when we saw the work in the museum it looked strangely familiar to us, and when read the name Edward Hopper on the label, this confirmed our previous feeling that we knew something about this artwork. Suddenly our lecture of the artwork became easier. We could then easily see the monochromatic blue tone used by the artist, as he did in his artwork Summertime (1943).We could also see the straight lines, the dual positive and negative spaces. The way of looking we exercised in this work was essentially biographical. So this question was an opportunity for us to talk about the ways of looking of an art which in our case was mostly biographical, because we quickly recognized the artist's style on his artwork after we knew he was the author.

Finally, we ask our students if they understood.  Their response was positive. We hope it really was. The main difficulty we had in that experience was that English is a second language for us, and it is embedded in our French accent. So, during our lecture, we felt sometimes necessary to make sure that the students got our pronunciation.