Elements & Principles
This element of art refers to the lightness or darkness of a colour or tone.
What is value?
Led by artists such as Monet and Renoir, this movement captured fleeting light and everyday moments with loose, visible brushwork.
What is Impressionism?
This term describes the underlying idea, message or meaning an artist communicates through an artwork.
What is concept?
QCAA Visual Art asks students to consider four of these when developing and analysing practice: personal, cultural, contemporary and formal.
What are contexts?
This folio of process work — visual diary entries, experiments and studies — documents an artist's developing ideas.
What is a visual art diary / process journal?
This principle of design creates a focal point that draws the viewer's eye first.
What is emphasis?
Associated with Picasso and Braque, this movement fractured subjects into geometric planes and multiple viewpoints.
What is Cubism?
This term refers to the social, cultural, historical or personal circumstances surrounding an artwork's making and reception.
What is context?
This context draws on an artist's own experiences, memories, values and identity as a source and lens for practice.
What is personal context?
This research approach uses the act of making art itself as the method of investigating an idea.
What is practice-led practice (or practice-led research)?
Artists build this kind of texture using marks, shading or pattern to suggest a surface quality the viewer can't actually touch.
What is implied (visual) texture?
Born from disillusionment after WWI, this movement rejected logic and traditional aesthetics through absurdist and readymade works.
What is Dada?
This term describes the skill of reading, interpreting and making meaning from visual imagery.
What is visual literacy?
This context considers the social, historical, political or cultural circumstances that shape an artwork's meaning.
What is cultural context?
This term describes an artwork considered finished and ready for exhibition or formal assessment.
What is a resolved work?
This principle describes the visual weight of a composition being distributed evenly — symmetrically, asymmetrically or radially.
What is balance?
Associated with artists like Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, this late-20th-century movement questioned originality through appropriation and pastiche.
What is Postmodernism?
This term describes placing two contrasting elements side by side to highlight their differences.
What is juxtaposition?
This context connects an artwork to current issues, debates, technologies or practices happening in the world right now.
What is contemporary context?
This describes what happens when an artist's original intention changes in response to discoveries made during the making process.
What is a shift in conceptual intent?
This element uses converging lines, overlapping and atmospheric perspective to suggest depth on a flat surface.
What is space?
This ongoing area of Australian practice foregrounds Country, culture and identity, often challenging colonial narratives of history.
What is contemporary Indigenous Australian art?
This term refers to the study of signs and symbols and how they generate meaning within an artwork.
What is semiotics?
This context focuses on the visual and material qualities of an artwork — its elements, principles, materials and techniques.
What is formal context?
Fiona Hall, Patricia Piccinini and Ben Quilty are all Australian artists known for building an ongoing, evolving one of these across their careers.
What is a body of work (practice)?