Drawing on your notes above, compose an analytical essay that relates the formal choices and
media of your given work to what you think might have been the artist’s intentions for it. Please
note that you may not necessarily have to discuss all the formal elements—instead, focus your
assessment on the most striking ones. (Though in order to achieve this, you should really take
all of them into account!)
It would be useful to begin with a general description of your work, and then make a judgment
about what you think the artist may have intended to convey in terms of subject matter and/or
intellectual and emotional content. How is the viewer expected to read this work, and what
should they get out of it? This will serve as the organizing thesis for your paper, and should be
stated in the first paragraph. Then make effective discussion of the formal elements (explain
how and where you see these in the work) in order to support this thesis (i.e., as “evidence”).
How has the artist used formal choices to reinforce the intended reading and reception of the
work? Conclude with a reasoned assessment of the work in terms of the artist’s overall success
in deploying these strategies.
Please remember that this is NOT an exercise in contextual research: library or on-line
research may be interesting and helpful to you, but it is not required, and will generally be only
marginally relevant to this assignment. Avoid including ‘filler’ in the form of biographical
information about the artist, histories of art movements, what art historians say, etc. This
assignment is about YOUR ability to look, to describe, to analyze, and to shape a convincing
argument based on the visual evidence.
Your paper should be no more than about 5-7 pages, double-spaced, 10- or 12-point type.
There is no need to include illustrations, but I would suggest that an image of your work and a
scan of these sheets of notes (with your sketch of the work) would be appropriate to submit
with your essay in order to help the instructor better understand your process of thinking. Your
finished paper should be submitted to an assignment dropbox which will be set up on our
course’s eLearn/Moodle website; this will have an automatic cutoff date and time, after
which no further submissions will be accepted. The Capilano University Writing Centre website
has useful online resources. It’s also a good idea to have a friend proofread your paper, both for
errors and clarity—if your friend can’t figure out what you’re trying to say, the instructor
probably can’t either!
A NOTE ON PLAGIARISM: All Capilano University regulations concerning plagiarism will be
strictly adhered to for this assignment. Uncredited passages of text taken from other sources
are plagiaristic, and in any case this kind of outside research is not required for this
assignment. In addition, please note that this is NOT a collaborative exercise: any two or
more papers which contain identical or near-identical ideas and text will be given a grade of
zero. Further information on plagiarism can be found on the Course Outline and on the Capilano
University website.
