Recognise a small number of art movements and styles, such as realistic, impressionistic, expressive and abstract approaches, and describe their key features in your own words

What this dot point is asking

SEAB wants you to recognise a small number of art movements and styles and to describe their key features in your own words. A style is a recognisable way of making art, and a movement is a group of artists sharing such a way at a certain time. You do not need deep art history at this level, but being able to tell a realistic from an abstract approach, and to spot a few major styles, helps you place and discuss artworks in the written paper. Importantly, you should describe these in your own words, never by copying or quoting sources.

The answer

What a movement and a style are

A style is a recognisable way of making art, with shared features such as the kind of marks, colours, subjects and degree of likeness. An art movement is a group of artists who worked in a shared style, often at a particular time and place, sometimes with shared ideas about what art should do. Styles change over time as artists react to each other and to the world, so knowing a few helps you see where a work might fit.

Realistic and impressionistic approaches

• A realistic approach tries to show things as they actually look, with accurate shapes, proportions, colours and detail, so the subject is clearly recognisable. The skill on show is careful observation and finish.
• An impressionistic approach captures an impression of a scene, especially its light and atmosphere in a moment, rather than fine detail. Look for loose, visible, broken brushstrokes, bright colours placed side by side, and an interest in light and weather, often in everyday outdoor scenes. It feels immediate and sketchy rather than smooth.

Expressive and abstract approaches

• An expressive approach puts feeling first, using bold colours, strong distorted shapes and energetic marks to convey emotion, even if that means moving away from accurate appearance. The mood matters more than the likeness.
• An abstract approach moves away from showing things realistically, using shape, colour and line for their own sake. The subject may be simplified, distorted, or not recognisable at all, so the arrangement of colours and shapes becomes the point.

These four sit on a rough scale from closest to appearance (realistic) to furthest from it (abstract).

Why styles change and how to use them

Styles change because artists respond to new ideas, new tools and a changing world, and because each generation reacts to the one before. For your purposes, recognising a style helps you in two ways: it gives you a vocabulary to describe how a work looks, and it lets you place a work roughly in its kind. Always describe the features in your own words, using the clues in the artwork itself.

Examples in context

Example 1. A detailed portrait versus a simplified one. A carefully observed portrait that captures every feature accurately shows a realistic approach, while a portrait reduced to a few bold shapes and flat colours leans toward abstraction. Seeing the two together makes the realistic-to-abstract scale clear and shows how the same subject can be treated very differently.

Example 2. An outdoor scene full of light. A garden painted with quick, broken dabs of bright colour, more interested in the sparkle of sunlight than in sharp detail, shows the impressionistic approach. Its loose strokes and luminous colour, described in your own words, are exactly the features that mark the style.

Try this

Q1. Explain, in your own words, the difference between a realistic and an abstract style. [2 marks]

• Cue. A realistic style shows things as they actually look, with accurate detail and proportions; an abstract style moves away from likeness, using shape, colour and line for their own sake.

Q2. Describe two features of an impressionistic approach. [2 marks]

• Cue. Loose, visible, broken brushstrokes and bright colours placed side by side, with an interest in capturing light and atmosphere rather than fine detail.

Q3. Why is it useful to recognise the style of an artwork when analysing it? [2 marks]

• Cue. The style gives you vocabulary to describe how the work looks and lets you place it roughly in its kind, so its features become evidence for the effect the artist creates.