Contextual studies: researching an artist properly
Art & Design · GCSE · The School
What the assessment objective actually asks
AO1 asks you to develop ideas through investigation, demonstrating critical understanding of sources. Every word there is about YOUR thinking. A page of dates demonstrates nothing critical, and a page of dates with a photocopy on it demonstrates less. Ask instead what the artist DID, in the making, that you could do too.
Look at the making, not the label
Take one work and answer four things you can see. How was it made — what marks, what tools, what order? What is the palette, and how few colours is it really? Where does the eye enter and where does it stop? What has been left out? All four are answerable from the work itself, and all four lead somewhere you can act on.
Context explains, it does not decorate
Context earns marks when it explains the work. "Painted during a wartime blackout, which is why the only light source is a single shaded lamp" is context doing work. "Painted in 1941" is a caption. Ask what about the time, place or purpose changed what the artist could or would do.
PAGE ONE, the research. One reproduction, reasonably large. Around it, four notes in your own words: the palette is three colours plus white; the paint is dragged with a stiff brush so the ground shows through; the light comes from one side and everything else is in shadow; the background is left almost empty. Then one sentence of context that explains something: painted under blackout conditions, hence the single light source. PAGE TWO, and this is where the marks are: your own study of your own subject, made with those methods — three colours plus white, a stiff dry brush, one light source, an empty background. Then a note saying what worked and what did not: "the dry brush suits the brickwork and is wrong for the sky; next one, dry brush below the roofline only." Nobody had to be told when the artist was born, and both pages are full of critical understanding.