About painting
What is Painting
History of Painting
Materials and Techniques
Oil Painting
Artcyclopedia: Impressionism - A list of major and minor Impressionist artists with links to online collections and museums. Arts: Art History: Movements: Impressionism
What is Painting
Painting is direct application of pigment to a surface to produce by tones of color or of light and dark some representation or decorative arrangement of natural or imagined forms, the expression of ideas and emotions, with the creation of certain aesthetic qualities, in a two-dimensional visual language. The elements of this language - its shapes, lines, colours, tones, and textures - are used in various ways to produce sensations of volume, space, movement, and light on a flat surface. These elements are combined into expressive patterns in order to represent real or supernatural phenomena, to interpret a narrative theme, or to create wholly abstract visual relationships. An artist's decision to use a particular medium, such as tempera, fresco, oil, watercolour, ink, gouache, encaustic, or casein, as well as the choice of a particular form, such as mural, easel, panel, miniature, manuscript illumination, scroll, screen or fan, panorama, or any of a variety of modern forms, is based on the sensuous qualities and the expressive possibilities and limitations of those options. The choices of the medium and the form, as well as the artist's own technique, combine to realize a unique visual image.
History of Painting
In ancient Greece and medieval Europe most buildings and sculptures were painted; nearly all of the ancient decoration has been lost, but some works from Egypt have preserved their coloring and give us an insight into the importance such an art can assume. The art of painting in China was linked from the 1st cent. A.D. with the development of the Buddhist faith. Early Christian and then Byzantine artists established iconographic and stylistic prototypes in wall painting and manuscript illumination that remained the basis for Christian art (see iconography).
Highly spiritualized in concept, the medieval painting tradition gave way to a more worldly orientation with the development of Renaissance art. The murals of Giotto became a vehicle for the expression of new and living ideas and sentiments. At the height of the Renaissance a large proportion of the works were decorations of walls and altarpieces, which were necessarily conceived in terms of their part in a larger decorative whole and their appeal for a large public. The greatest masterpieces of Raphael and Michelangelo and of the Florentine masters are generally public works of this character. The same period also saw the rise of the separate easel painting and the first use of oil on canvas. Simultaneously are found the beginnings of genre and other secular themes and the elaboration of portraiture.
Basing their art on the technical contributions of the Renaissance, e.g., the study of perspective and anatomy, the baroque masters added a virtuosity of execution and a style of unparalleled drama. From the age of the rococo, painting tended in the direction of greater intimacy. It is noteworthy, for example, that many of the masterpieces of the 19th cent., and particularly of impressionism, are small easel paintings suitable for the private home. The same period saw the rise of the large public gallery with both temporary and permanent exhibitions, an institution greatly expanded in the 20th cent.
A reawakened interest in mural painting and the contributions of painting to such arts as the motion picture and video have led some to believe that a return to a greater emphasis on the public functions of the art is taking place. Such a view can find support in the notable influence of abstract painting in the fields of industrial and architectural design. This art also continues to enjoy undiminished popularity in the home and gallery. Painting has had a long and glorious world history as an independent art. From Giotto to Picasso and from Ma Yuan to Hokusai, painting has never ceased to produce great exponents who have expressed not merely the taste but the aspirations, the concepts of space, form, and color, and the philosophy of their respective periods.
Materials and Techniques
Painters use a number of materials to produce the effects they desire. These include the materials of the surface, or ground; the pigments employed; the binder, or medium, in which the color is mixed; and its diluting agent. Among the various media used by artists are fresco, watercolor, oil, distemper, gouache, tempera, and encaustic. In addition to these, painting properly embraces many other techniques ordinarily associated with drawing, a term that is often used to refer to the linear aspects of the same art. If painting and drawing are not always clearly distinguishable from each other, both are to be distinguished from the print (or work of graphic art), in which the design is not produced directly but is transferred from another surface to that which it decorates. While the print may be one of many identical works, the painting or drawing is always unique. Painting has been freely combined with many other arts, including sculpture, architecture, and, in the modern era, photography.
Arts: Visual Arts: Painting: Painters: Impressionism Impressionism: Paintings Collected by Russian and Ukrainian Gallery - Online art exhibition including the works of reeminent Impressionists.
Oil Painting
Oil painting is the art of applying oil-based colors to a surface to create a picture or other design. Oil painting developed in Europe in the late Middle Ages and traditionally Jan Van Eyck is credited with its invention. Painting in oil colours, a medium consisting of pigments suspended in drying oils. The outstanding facility with which fusion of tones or colour is achieved makes it unique among fluid painting mediums; at the same time, satisfactory linear treatment and crisp effects are easily obtained. Opaque, transparent, and translucent painting all lie within its range, and it is unsurpassed for textural variation.
In contrast to older wax- and water-based media (such as encaustic painting, fresco, tempera and watercolor painting), oil paint is easier to use and allows a greater variety of effects. Its slow-drying properties have little effect on the colors -- tones are easy to match, blend, or grade, and corrections are easy to make. Oil paint may be applied in linear brushstrokes, as glazes, washes, blobs, trickles, spray, or impasto...
Oil paint consists of pigment, or colored powders, ground in oil that dries on exposure to air. The oil is usually linseed but may be poppy or walnut oils. The resulting stiff, creamy paste is packaged in flexible tubes.
Painting surfaces are supports, either wood or linen, cotton, or jute canvas stretched on a frame or glued to a board. The support is covered with a ground -- a thin coating of gesso is most common which makes the support less absorbent and provides an even painting surface.
Traditionally, oil painting proceeds in stages. The design is sketched on the prepared painting surface in pencil, charcoal, or paint diluted with turpentine. Next, broad areas of color are filled in with thin paint. These areas are gradually refined and corrected with thicker paint layers. Pan is applied using brushes but a flexible palette knife may also be utilized. The process may require only a few sessions or may extend over months or even years.
Original oil paintings by Russian and Ukrainian artists whose manner of style borrows on the tenets of Impressionism, Arts: Art History: Movements: Impressionism: Russian and Ukrainian Impressionism Painting: History of Painting: Materials&Techniques: Oil Painting
