Words to Describe Art: A Challenge!

The question was raised in Dayle Doroshow's post at That Creative Place's blog: how can we describe designs or pieces of art that have a certain quality? She was looking for a word that meant something like "Sophisticated" but when she looked the word up, she realized it didn't fit at all. She chose to use the words, "natural elegance". It's a good term.

This is what natural elegance looks like to me:


Elegant! Degas, Little Dancer

It really got me thinking and I realized that this is the same kind of thing that I ran across while studying art and art history. So seldom can one word describe or categorize any given piece of work in art or craft. And I think about the comments that we leave for others when we show our work...beautiful....gorgeous...cute...etc.

This is indeed a Gorgeous bracelet by Etsy seller Coralia


This pin really IS Darling. by Pat Winter


But how do you describe this?
It more complicated than to just give it a one-word comment.



Etsy seller TilebyFire

The reason that art and craft is so hard to sum up is because there are so many different aspects to a work. You can talk about the color (bright, muted, subdued, bold, luminous), the shape (angular, linear, organic, proportional), the composition (well-composed, asymmetrical, balanced, unified) and we haven't even brushed on meaning, genre, or other elements of art. All of these things apply to craft as well as fine art.

It would be fortunate for us if we had many descriptive words just for the word "beautiful" in art like the Inuit people have for snow (urban legend, BTW). But it's not that simple. I challenge you to look closer at the works that you see and comment on to find something more specific to say about what you're looking at. It can be a teaching tool in our own art-making.

Here are some more of my words:

Vibrant
Mystical
Abstract
Original
Unique
Intuitive
Rhythmic
Flowing
Swirling
Dramatic
Vibrant
Primitive
Strong
and my ultimate word....sublime.

This hasn't answered any of Dayle's question because I'm not so sure there is a word that describes natural elegance. Much of it lies in one's own interpretation of the word. Maybe the most important thing is to know what the words mean to us and what we're looking for in our art.

I haven't touched on the negative words to describe a work. But we should be aware of these, also because we can learn from these as well. We probably won't be leaving any of those on our favorite blogs, though.