I conducted research last Spring for one of my art history classes. The prompt was for us to go into the Gregory Allicar Museum and pick one work of art from the European section and find out as much about it as we could. This was challenging because there wasn’t a lot of information on all the pieces of art so we had to do a lot of digging and often had to arrive at our own conclusions based on the research we had conducted. The work of art I chose to research was View of Delphi from a Procession by Claude Lorrain. The type of research I conducted would have been classified as “exploration”. This is because there wasn’t much information about the specific piece of art I was researching. I began my research by reading about the history of when that piece was made. I also read as much as I could about the artist’s personal life. Once I knew the context for the piece, I was able to start to piece together it’s meaning and what the artist was trying to say. The type of research approach I used was “qualitative research”. I was looking into different works of arts from that time period and using visual analysis to try and figure out the social context of the time and try to figure out why the artist painted what he did.
The genre I chose to utilize for my research was “unobtrusive methods”. The majority of my research was looking at other works from the time period to figure out what the culture was like, and then using that to theorize what the artist might have been saying.
The paradigm that I applied as the perspective was “postpositivist interpretive/ constructivist critical” and the theoretical school I focused on was “phenomenology”. Lorrain painted landscapes and he was one of the first artists to sketch en plein air, meaning he was recording exactly what he was seeing so it was a record of his experience.
Finally, my method of research was visual analysis, and historical-comparative. Those were the two methods I used to learn more about this painting that was relatively unknown.
The approach I want to use to integrate my visual studies with my second field is arts-based. I want to create some kind of artwork for my project and the first step to creating a piece of art is doing research. I think this approach will help me learn about experiences and perspectives that aren’t my own. I could use this approach and my platform as an artist to make works focused around social justice that call for change.