Visual literacy has been as the ability to understand, interpret and evaluate visual messages. It’s the idea that pictures can be read and the meaning can be communicated through a process of reading. Visual literacy is about analyzing and creating messages. Those who create visual images (artists, photographers etc.) do so with a purpose in mind, using certain techniques.
Now, we know that today we live in a media saturated age. We’re taking images all the time and we need to broaden what it means to be literate to read images rather than text as image. Most of the information is communicated visually through images. Whether they are images in a text or a text book, news photos in the morning’s newspaper or a digitally altered photo of a fashion model on the cover of a magazine, images have become a major part of our world. So it’s more than reading and writing, it’s reading and understanding the visual world.
Everything we see is an image. There really isn’t a difference between text and image because a text is an image and an image is a text. So we have to learn how to read images through the process of vision. Little children, were told, from the first day they have on the planet up to the age of five, take more information than at any other time in their life. They’re truly sentient being, taking in information with all their human senses all the time.
Art is a language. It’s a form of communication. So to be visually literate, you’ve got to know the alphabet, the vocabulary and the grammar of seeing. Art can be created in any way, using any material the artist makes shape, form or an image. Artist is every person who creates art. The artwork, itself describes the artist. By seeing, touching the artwork we can spot the soul of the artist poured into the artwork while creating it. Seeing the colors we can feel the emotions of the artist. Art makes us see the world through another person’s perspective. Every art piece has a meaning behind it, but it doesn’t mean that everyone will see and feel that certain meaning. We all can lay eyes on a same artwork and still have wildly different reactions to it. We may overlook the meaning or read the message that the artist is sending to us, and create our own, based on how it makes us feel. Everyone is entitled to their own preferences and feelings when it comes to art.
There is a shallow surface level of enjoyment of merely looking at a beautiful piece of art. The deeper, richer level of enjoyment only comes when we critically examine the artwork. Trying to find why the artist chose a specific color or a particular perspective. Through a number of varying elements the artist is trying to convey a meaning to the audience. Everyone reacts to art differently and has the potential to grow and learn from it. It gives us the opportunity to tell stories, record history and tap into our emotions in a way that few other things can. Art is often an outward expression of our emotions, like our happiness, sadness, temporary anger, but it can be more than that. Creating art allows us to express our thoughts, perspectives of the world, our fears, dreams and desires. Art is basically painting our personalities onto a canvas.
People for ages have been communicating through art and as a result of that today we have many beautiful and meaningful artworks. One of them is “The Persistence of Memory” painted by Salvador Dali, and one of his most recognizable works. This painting is a relatively small painting but full of meaning. In this painting there are three melting watches present. For some people they represent how time is eternal and always flowing, some experts say the clocks represent Albert Einstein’s discovery at the time of the theory of relativity. This theory proposed the idea that time was complex and relative, that time was not fixed. It could also be that Dali is trying to show that pocket watches are outdated and no longer needed in an evolving world. The artist himself says that the melting watches are simply like that because earlier in the day he had seams some melting cheese under the sun and that’s what it looked like. This is an example how single painting can invoke different perspectives when analyzing it.