Art Appreciation

The book that was in the picture above was one of the heavy books that I have to carry to school every Wednesday. This is the book for my Art Appreciation, art 103 class. The tittle of the book is called " Living With Art" by Mark Getlein. In that class,we can use two different editions of the book; both seventh and eighth edition,and the one that is shown on the picture is the eighth edition because our professor didn't know that the art department had ordered a new edition while the professor was still thinking to lecture with the seventh edition in her mind. Anyway, the book cover you see above was a really nice painting called Las Meninas, by a 17th century Spanish artist Velazquez. The book "Living With Art" has total of 603 pages and there are twenty-two chapters, which are well categorized into five mains parts; Intruction, The Vocabular of Art, Two-Dimensional Media, Three-Dimensional Media, and Arts in Time. I won't call it a heavy book for nothing. Inside the book, there are so many images of different types of art work that are by both famous and non-famous artists. The images are well organized and the way the images organized is depends on the materials of the chapters. There are also pages that are just for the artists in the book, in thoses pages, they gave us infomation of lives, works and background of differenet artists. The one main big assignment is to read the chapters and there are reading guides that we have to work on. The reading guide is actually the worksheet that the professor has prepared for students to look at important materials and mark down some of the important notes from the chapers. It is usually one to three pages long per chapter and it is a really good thing, it leads student directly to the main point of the chapter, however, we still call the reading guide a short answer worksheet. The one last thing, this book is really useful when there is exams like midterm or final, because the exams are take-home exam, students can look at the books as long and as much as they want!!


This the nineth week of the semester, the art class has finished with the first four chapters; Living with Arth, What is Art?, Theres of Art, and The Visual Elements are the ones that the class has finished with so far, and Principles of Design is the one we are currently working on. I don't quite remember if the book is regular college book or one of those books that especially printed for ESL students. The reading level of the book is a little bit about my level, there are still so many words that I am not familiar with and words that I have never heard of. However, I still like reading this book because there are whole bunch of images that I can look at, so where there is information like the differences between two different types of artwork, I can just simply look at the artwork and determine the differences. The book also contains a lot of infomations that students from other art related class may like to read about such as, Principles of Design, Fraphic Design and Illustration, and Architecture. The book itself is a really cool book to read, but I just don't like it the fact that it is really heavy and made me very tired every Wednseday after classes.