To the modern ear, calling something ‘grotesque’ is just a swankier way of saying it’s grim and nasty. What follows is a brief exploration of some of the more fascinating coinages of words that have long since eased their way from their artistic origins into casual conversation. To dig deeper into the biographies of such ordinary words as ‘silhouette’, ‘panorama’ and ‘dude’ is to uncover surprising histories that change the way we understand and appreciate their resonance and ever-evolving meaning. Rather, ‘landscape’ was created to denote a painterly illusion of such rural reality: the rendering in pigment on canvas of a 2D replica of hills and fields, rivers and trees – not the thing itself.Ī quick glance back at the words we use every day to discuss our experience of the world reveals a hidden reliance on language hatched by art and artists. The word itself was devised in the early 17th Century not to describe an actual out-of-doors expanse of inland terrain or a gardener’s manicuring of a natural scene. How black women were whitewashed by artīefore anyone ever walked through a ‘landscape’, an artist painted one. Which came first, the chicken or the Fabergé egg – the world itself, or the artistic expressions we use to see and describe it? While it is always observed with surprise when reality appears to imitate art, in fact the world of painting, drawing, and sculpture is responsible for giving us a great deal of the language with which we understand and articulate our experience of being in the universe.
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