The image of love within art can come in many different ways, depending on the artist’s style, the period in which they were prominent and also the way in which the artist chooses to focus on this most powerful emotion.
The image of love within art can come in many different ways, depending on the artist’s style, the period in which they were prominent and also the way in which the artist chooses to focus on this most powerful emotion. This article looks into the different ways that any artist might feature romance within their paintings as well as considering other media which now also are of significant interest to the mainstream public, such as sculpture, digital images, film, television and literature.
In most cases love is used to portray positive influences upon the lives of people and as such provides uplifting paintings, as seen in The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. The likes of Edvard Munch have continued this topic with oils, whilst Robert Doisneau carried it over into photography and in fact Brancusi created his own version of Klimt’s classic painting as a highly respected sculpture. The personal nature of romance makes it a popular tool for most aspiring artists and it is difficult to think of any other human emotion which brings such drama and excitement to so many people in real life. Film and television have also picked up on the creative potential here and continue to produce shows that centre around key relationships and the ups and downs that can happen. These storylines also seem particularly popular too and as such soap operas frequently dominate national audience ratings in most western countries. With television becoming more and more formulaic and safe, there seems little likelihood that this trend will change any time soon.
It is certainly easy to conclude that the influence of love and romance remains very strong within art and that it is now also prevalent in the other forms of media that have risen from the developments in technology over the past few centuries, including film, television and digital images. Others such as literature and sculpture are similarly important but have been around for much the same length of time as art. The emotion of love brings a great number of different options to an artist that makes it such a flexible subject to deal with and the eventual work can be extremely positive or negative, depending on what the artist chooses to focus on. Whatever they choose to go for, love brings polarised emotions and behaviours in the extreme and as such it makes an excellent inspirational tool for creative types of all media.
