human figure in art
The human figure in art Through out the history of art the human figure has been used as a focus for many artists’ work. The human form in art can directly display great emotion, beauty, sexuality spirituality and all that is human kind. ... In early societies the human form was used in art to represent the supernatural gods and spirits. In the renaissance there were portraits of the rich and royal and spiritual paintings displaying the voluptuous woman’s figure. Western society’s art oppression with the figure may be representative of our society’s humanist outlook, with man kind at the centre at the universe. Contemporary art displays distortions of the figure which may represent human alienation and anguish. Today’s artists that focus on the figure have many ways of representing and different reasons for working with the figure. Two contemporary and contrasting artists which use the human figure in their works are Kelly Borsheim and Shelagh Morgan. Kelly Borsheim is a sculpture and painter who has a fascination with the natural human form and has been very successful in her work based on this “the lines and shapes of the human form are intriguing, beautiful and unique” (Kelly Borsheim, biography) She was born in 1964 in Minnesota (USA).