Painting, 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, acrylic, watercolour or other water-based paints, 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.
Earlier cultural traditions—of tribes, religions, guilds, royal courts, and states—largely controlled the craft, form, imagery, and subject matter of painting and determined its function, whether ritualistic, devotional, decorative, entertaining, or educational. Painters were employed more as skilled artisans than as creative artists. Later the notion of the “fine artist” developed in Asia and Renaissance Europe. Prominent painters were afforded the social status of scholars and courtiers; they signed their work, decided its design and often its subject and imagery, and established a more personal—if not always amicable—relationship with their patrons.
During the 19th century painters in Western societies began to lose their social position and secure patronage. Some artists countered the decline in patronage support by holding their own exhibitions and charging an entrance fee. Others earned an income through touring exhibitions of their work. The need to appeal to a marketplace had replaced the similar (if less impersonal) demands of patronage, and its effect on the art itself was probably similar as well. Generally, artists in the 20th century could reach an audience only through commercial galleries and public museums, although their work may have been occasionally reproduced in art periodicals. They may also have been assisted by financial awards or commissions from industry and the state. They had, however, gained the freedom to invent their own visual language and to experiment with new forms and unconventional materials and techniques. For example, some painters combined other media, such as sculpture, with painting to produce three-dimensional abstract designs. Other artists attached real objects to the canvas in collage fashion or used electricity to operate coloured kinetic panels and boxes. Conceptual artists frequently expressed their ideas in the form of a proposal for an unrealizable project, while performance artists were an integral part of their own compositions. The restless endeavour to extend the boundaries of expression in art produced continuous international stylistic changes. The often bewildering succession of new movements in painting was further stimulated by the swift interchange of ideas by means of international art journals, traveling exhibitions, and art centres. Such exchanges accelerated in the 21st century with the explosion of international art fairs and the advent of social media, the latter of which offered not only new means of expression but direct communication between artists and their followers. Although stylistic movements were hard to identify, some artists addressed common societal issues, including the broad themes of racism, LGBTQ rights, and climate change.
Elements And Principle Of Design
The design of a painting is its visual format: the arrangement of its lines, shapes, colours, tones, and textures into an expressive pattern. It is the sense of inevitability in this formal organization that gives a great painting its self-sufficiency and presence. The colours and placing of the principal images in a design may be sometimes largely decided by representational and symbolic considerations. Yet it is the formal interplay of colours and shapes that alone is capable of communicating a particular mood, producing optical sensations of space, volume, movement, and light and creating forces of both harmony and tension, even when a painting’s narrative symbolism is obscure.
ELEMENTS OF DESIGN
LINE
Each of the design elements has special expressive qualities. Line, for example, is an intuitive, primeval convention for representing things; the simple linear imagery of young children’s drawings and prehistoric rock paintings is universally understood. The formal relationships of thick with thin lines, of broken with continuous, and of sinuous with jagged are forces of contrast and repetition in the design of many paintings in all periods of history. Variations in the painted contours of images also provide a direct method of describing the volume, weight, spatial position, light, and textural characteristics of things. The finest examples of this pictorial shorthand are found in Japanese ink painting, where an expressive economy and vitality of line is closely linked to a traditional mastery of calligraphy.
SHAPE AND MASS
Shape and mass, as elements of design, include all areas of different colour, tone, and texture, as well as individual and grouped images. There is generally a cellular unity, or “family likeness,” between the shapes and masses in a design similar to the visual harmony of all units to the whole observed in natural forms—the gills, fins, and scales in character with the overall shape of a fish, for example. The negative spaces between shapes and masses are also carefully considered by the artist, since they can be so adjusted as to enhance the action and character of the positive images. They can be as important to the design as time intervals in music or the voids of an architectural facade.
COLOUR
In many styles and periods of painting, the functions of colour are primarily decorative and descriptive, often serving merely to reinforce the expression of an idea or subject communicated essentially in terms of line and tone. In much of modern painting, however, the full-spectrum range of pigments available has allowed colour to be the primary expressive element. The principal dimensions of colour in painting are the variables or attributes of hue, tone, and intensity. Red, yellow, and blue are the basic hues from which all others on the chromatic scale can be made by mixtures. These three opaque hues are the subtractive pigment primaries and should not be confused with the behaviour of the additive triads and mixtures of transparent, coloured light. Mixtures of primary pairs produce the secondary hues of orange, violet, and green. By increasing the amount of one primary in each of these mixtures, the tertiary colours of yellow-orange, orange-red, red-violet, violet-blue, blue-green, and green-yellow, respectively, are made. The primary colours, with their basic secondary and tertiary mixtures, can be usefully notated as the 12 segments of a circle, as conveniently depicted in the common colour wheel. The secondary and tertiary colour segments between a pair of parent primaries can then be seen to share a harmonious family relationship with one another—the yellow-orange, orange, and orange-red hues that lie between yellow and red, for example.
TEXTURE
Pointillism (a term given to the Neo-Impressionist system of representing the shimmer of atmospheric light with spots of coloured pigment) produced an overall granular texture. As an element of design, texture includes all areas of a painting enriched or animated by vibrating patterns of lines, shapes, tones, and colours, in addition to the tactile textures created by the plastic qualities of certain mediums. Decorative textures may be of geometrical repeat patterns, as in much of Indian, Islamic, and medieval European painting and other art, or of representations of patterns in nature, such as scattered leaves, falling snow, and flights of birds.
VOLUME AND SPACE
The perceptual and conceptual methods of representing volume and space on the flat surface of a painting are related to the two levels of understanding spatial relationships in everyday life. Perceptual space is the view of things at a particular time and from a fixed position. This is the stationary window view recorded by the camera and represented in the later periods of ancient Greek and Roman paintings and in most Western schools of painting since the Renaissance. Illusions of perceptual space are generally created by use of the linear perspectival system, based on the observations that objects appear to the eye to shrink and parallel lines and planes to converge as they approach the horizon, or viewer’s eye level.
TIME AND MOVEMENTS
Time and movement in painting are not restricted to representations of physical energy, but they are elements of all design. Part of the viewer’s full experience of a great painting is to allow the arrangement of lines, shapes, and accents of tone or colour to guide the eye across the picture surface at controlled tempos and rhythmic directions. These arrangements contribute overall to the expression of a particular mood, vision, and idea.
PRINCIPLE OF DESIGNS
Because painting is a two-dimensional art, the flat pattern of lines and shapes is an important aspect of design, even for those painters concerned with creating illusions of great depth. And, since any mark made on the painting surface can be perceived as a spatial statement—for it rests upon it—there are also qualities of three-dimensional design in paintings composed primarily of flat shapes. Shapes in a painting, therefore, may be balanced with one another as units of a flat pattern and considered at the same time as components in a spatial design, balanced one behind another. A symmetrical balance of tone and colour masses of equal weight creates a serene and sometimes monumental design, while a more dynamic effect is created by an asymmetrical balance. Geometrical shapes and masses are often the basic units in the design of both “flat patterns,” such as Byzantine and Islamic paintings, and “sculptural compositions,” such as Baroque and Neoclassical figure tableaux. The flat, overlapping squares, circles, and triangles that create the pattern of a Romanesque mural, for example, become the interlocking cubic, spherical, and pyramidal components that enclose the grouped figures and surrounding features in a Renaissance or a Neoclassical composition.
Design Relationship Between Painting And Other Visual Arts
The philosophy and spirit of a particular period in painting usually have been reflected in many of its other visual arts. The ideas and aspirations of the ancient cultures, of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical periods of Western art, and of the 19th-century Art Nouveau and Secessionist movements were expressed in much of the architecture, interior design, furniture, textiles, ceramics, dress design, and handicrafts, as well as in the fine arts, of their times. Following the Industrial Revolution, with the redundancy of handcraftmanship and the loss of direct communication between the fine artist and society, idealistic efforts to unite the arts and crafts in service to the community were made by William Morris in Victorian England and by the Bauhaus in 20th-century Germany. Although their aims were not fully realized, their influences, like those of the short-lived de Stijl and Constructivist movements, have been far-reaching, particularly in architectural, furniture, and typographic design. In turn, painters have been stimulated by the imagery, techniques, and design of other visual arts. One of the earliest of these influences was possibly from the theatre, where the ancient Greeks are thought to have been the first to employ the illusions of optical perspective. The discovery or reappraisal of design techniques and imagery in the art forms and processes of other cultures has been an important stimulus to the development of more recent styles of Western painting, whether or not their traditional significance have been fully understood. The influence of Japanese woodcut prints on Synthetism and the Nabis, for example, and of African sculpture on Cubism and the German Expressionists helped to create visual vocabularies and syntax with which to express new visions and ideas. The invention of photography introduced painters to new aspects of nature, while eventually prompting others to abandon representational painting altogether. Painters of everyday life, such as Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Vuillard, and Bonnard, exploited the design innovations of camera cutoffs, close-ups, and unconventional viewpoints in order to give the spectator the sensation of sharing an intimate picture space with the figures and objects in the painting.
Techniques And Methods
Whether a painting reached completion by careful stages or was executed directly by a hit-or-miss alla prima method (in which pigments are laid on in a single application) was once largely determined by the ideals and established techniques of its cultural tradition. For example, the medieval European illuminator’s painstaking procedure, by which a complex linear pattern was gradually enriched with gold leaf and precious pigments, was contemporary with the Song Chinese Chan (Zen) practice of immediate, calligraphic brush painting, following a contemplative period of spiritual self-preparation. More recently, artists have decided the techniques and working methods best suited to their aims and temperaments. In France in the 1880s, for instance, Seurat might be working in his studio on drawings, tone studies, and colour schemes in preparation for a large composition at the same time that, outdoors, Monet was endeavouring to capture the effects of afternoon light and atmosphere, while Cézanne analyzed the structure of the mountain Sainte-Victoire with deliberated brush strokes, laid as irrevocably as mosaic tesserae (small pieces, such as marble or tile). The kind of relationship established between artist and patron, the site and subject matter of a painting commission, and the physical properties of the medium employed may also dictate working procedure. Peter Paul Rubens, for example, followed the businesslike 17th-century custom of submitting a small oil sketch, or modella, for his client’s approval before carrying out a large-scale commission. Siting problems peculiar to mural painting, such as spectator eye level and the scale, style, and function of a building interior, had first to be solved in preparatory drawings and sometimes with the use of wax figurines or scale models of the interior. Scale working drawings are essential to the speed and precision of execution demanded by quick-drying mediums, such as buon fresco (see below) on wet plaster and acrylic resin on canvas. The drawings traditionally are covered with a network of squares, or “squared-up,” for enlarging on the surface of the support. Some modern painters preferred to outline the enlargement of a sketch projected directly onto the support by epidiascope (a projector for images of both opaque and transparent objects).
MEDIUMS
By technical definition, mediums are the liquids added to paints to bind them and make them workable. They are discussed here, however, in the wider meaning of all the various paints, tools, supports, surfaces, and techniques employed by painters. The basis of all paints is variously coloured pigment, ground to a fine powder. The different expressive capacities and characteristic final surface texture of each medium are determined by the vehicle with which it is bound and thinned, the nature and surface preparation of the support, and the tools and technique with which it is handled. Pigments are derived from various natural and artificial sources. The oldest and most permanent pigments are the blacks, prepared from bone and charcoal, and the clay earths, such as raw umber and raw sienna, which can be changed by heating into darker, warmer browns. In early periods of painting, readily available pigments were few. Certain intense hues were obtainable only from the rarer minerals, such as cinnabar (orange-red vermilion), lapis lazuli (violet-blue ultramarine), and malachite (green). These were expensive and therefore reserved for focal accents and important symbolic features in the design. The opening of trade routes and the manufacture of synthetic substitutes gradually extended the range of colours available to painters.
TEMPERA
A tempera medium is dry pigment tempered with an emulsion and thinned with water. The ancient medium was in constant use in most world cultures, until in Europe it was gradually superseded by oil paints during the Renaissance. Tempera was the mural medium in the ancient dynasties of Egypt, Babylonia, Mycenean Greece, and China and was used to decorate the early Christian catacombs. It was employed on a variety of supports, from the stone stelae (or commemorative pillars), mummy cases, and papyrus rolls of ancient Egypt to the wood panels of Byzantine icons and altarpieces and the vellum leaves of medieval illuminated manuscripts. The special ground for tempera painting is a rigid wood or wallboard panel coated with several thin layers of gesso, a white, smooth, fully absorbent preparation made of burnt gypsum (or chalk, plaster of Paris, or whiting) and hide (or parchment) glue. A few minutes after application, tempera paint is sufficiently resistant to water to allow overpainting with more colour. Thin, transparent layers of paint produce a clear, luminous effect, and the colour tones of successive brushstrokes blend optically. Modern tempera paintings are sometimes varnished or overpainted with thin, transparent oil glazes to produce full, deep-toned results, or they are left unglazed for blond, or light, effects.
FRESCO
Fresco (Italian: “fresh”) is the traditional medium for painting directly onto a wall or ceiling. It is the oldest known painting medium, surviving in the prehistoric cave mural decorations and perfected in 16th-century Italy in the buon fresco method. The cave paintings are thought to date from about 20,000–15,000 BCE. Their pigments probably have been preserved by a natural sinter process of rainwater seeping through the limestone rocks to produce saturated bicarbonate. The colours were rubbed across rock walls and ceilings with sharpened solid lumps of the natural earths (yellow, red, and brown ochre). Outlines were drawn with black sticks of wood charcoal. The discovery of mixing dishes suggests that liquid pigment mixed with fat was also used and smeared with the hand. The subtle tonal gradations of colour on animals painted in the Altamira and Lascaux caves appear to have been dabbed in two stages with fur pads, natural variations on the rock surface being exploited to assist in creating effects of volume. Feathers and frayed twigs may have been used in painting manes and tails.
FRESCO SECCO:- In the fresco secco, or lime-painting, method, the plastered surface of a wall is soaked with slaked lime. Lime-resistant pigments are applied swiftly before the plaster sets. Secco colours dry lighter than their tone at the time of application, producing the pale, matte, chalky quality of a distempered wall. Although the pigments are fused with the surface, they are not completely absorbed and may flake in time, as in sections of Giotto’s 14th-century San Francesco murals at Assisi. Secco painting was the prevailing medieval and early Renaissance medium and was revived in 18th-century Europe by artists such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, François Boucher, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.
BUON FRESCO:- Buon’, or “true,” fresco is the most-durable method of painting murals, since the pigments are completely fused with a damp plaster ground to become an integral part of the wall surface. The stone or brick wall is first prepared with a brown trullisatio scratch coat, or rough-cast plaster layer. This is then covered by the arricciato coat, on which the linear design of the preparatory cartoon is pounced or engraved by impressing the outlines into the moist, soft plaster with a bone or metal stylus. These lines were usually overworked in reddish sinopia pigment. A thin layer of fine plaster is then evenly spread, allowing the linear design to show through. Before this final intonaco ground sets, pigments thinned with water or slaked lime are applied rapidly with calf-hair and hog-bristle brushes; depth of colour is achieved by a succession of quick-drying glazes. Being prepared with slaked lime, the plaster becomes saturated with an aqueous solution of hydrate of lime, which takes up carbonic acid from the air as it soaks into the paint. Carbonate of lime is produced and acts as a permanent pigment binder. Pigment particles crystallize in the plaster, fusing it with the surface to produce the characteristic lustre of buonfresco colours. When dry, these are matte and lighter in tone. Colours are restricted to the range of lime-resistant earth pigments. Mineral colours such as blue, affected by lime, are applied over earth pigment when the plaster is dry.
SGRAFFITO:- Sgraffito (Italian graffiare, “to scratch”) is a form of fresco painting for exterior walls. A rough plaster undercoat is followed by thin plaster layers, each stained with a different lime-fast colour. These coats are covered by a fine-grain mortar finishing surface. The plaster is then engraved with knives and gouges at different levels to reveal the various coloured layers beneath. The sintered-lime process binds the colours. The surface of modern sgraffito frescoes is often enriched with textures made by impressing nails and machine parts, combined with mosaics of stone, glass, plastic, and metal tesserae.
OIL
Oil paints are made by mixing dry pigment powder with refined linseed oil to a paste, which is then milled in order to disperse the pigment particles throughout the oil vehicle. According to the 1st-century Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, whose writings the Flemish painters Hubert and Jan van Eyck are thought to have studied, the Romans used oil colours for shield painting. The earliest use of oil as a fine-art medium is generally attributed to 15th-century European painters, such as Giovanni Bellini and the van Eycks, who glazed oil colour over a glue-tempera underpainting. It is also thought probable, however, that medieval manuscript illuminators had been using oil glazes in order to achieve greater depth of colour and more subtle tonal transitions than their tempera medium allowed. Oils have been used on linen, burlap, cotton, wood, hide, rock, stone, concrete, paper, cardboard, aluminum, copper, plywood, and processed boards, such as masonite, pressed wood, and hardboard. The surface of rigid panels is traditionally prepared with gesso and that of canvas with one or more coats of white acrylic resin emulsion or with a coat of animal glue followed by thin layers of white-lead oil primer. Oil paints can be applied undiluted to these prepared surfaces or can be used thinned with pure gum turpentine or its substitute, white mineral spirit. The colours are slow drying; the safest dryer to speed the process is cobalt siccative.
The tractable nature of the oil medium has sometimes encouraged careless craftsmanship. Working over partly dry pigment or priming may produce a wrinkled surface. The excessive use of oil as a vehicle causes colours to yellow and darken, while cracking, blooming, powdering, and flaking can result from poor priming, overthinning with turpentine, or the use of varnish dryers and other spirits. Colour changes may also occur through the use of chemically incompatible pigment mixtures or from the fading of fugitive synthetic hues, such as crimson lakes, the brilliant red pigment favoured by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
WATERCOLOUR
Watercolours are pigments ground with gum arabic and gall and thinned with water in use. Sable and squirrel (“camel”) hair brushes are used on white or tinted paper and card. Three hundred years before the late 18th-century English watercolourists, German artist Albrecht Dürer anticipated their technique of transparent colour washes in a remarkable series of plant studies and panoramic landscapes. Until the emergence of the English school, however, watercolour became a medium merely for colour tinting outlined drawings or, combined with opaque body colour to produce effects similar to gouache or tempera, was used in preparatory studies for oil paintings. In the “pure” watercolour technique, often referred to as the English method, no white or other opaque pigment is applied, colour intensity and tonal depth being built up by successive, transparent washes on damp paper. Patches of white paper are left unpainted to represent white objects and to create effects of reflected light. These flecks of bare paper produce the sparkle characteristic of pure watercolour. Tonal gradations and soft, atmospheric qualities are rendered by staining the paper when it is very wet with varying proportions of pigment. Sharp accents, lines, and coarse textures are introduced when the paper has dried. The paper should be of the type sold as “handmade from rags”; this is generally thick and grained. Cockling is avoided when the surface dries out if the dampened paper has been first stretched across a special frame or held in position during painting by an edging of tape.
INK
Ink is the traditional painting medium of China and Japan, where it has been used with long-haired brushes of wolf, goat, or badger on silk or absorbent paper. Asian black ink is a gum-bound carbon stick that is ground on rough stone and mixed with varying amounts of water to create a wide range of modulated tones or applied almost dry, with lightly brushed strokes, to produce coarser textures. The calligraphic brush technique is expressive of Zen Buddhist and Confucian philosophies, brush-stroke formulas for the spiritual interpretation of nature in painting dictating the use of the lifted brush tip for the “bone,” or “lean,” structure of things and the spreading belly of the hairs for their “flesh,” or “fat,” volumes. The East Asian artist poises the brush vertically above the paper and controls its rhythmic movements from the shoulder. Distant forms represented in landscapes painted on silk were sometimes brushed on from the reverse side.
GOUACHE
Gouache is opaque watercolour, known also as poster paint and designer’s colour. It is thinned with water for applying, with sable- and hog-hair brushes, to white or tinted paper and card and, occasionally, to silk. Honey, starch, or acrylic is sometimes added to slacken its quick-drying property. Liquid glue is preferred as a thinner by painters wishing to retain the tonality of colours (which otherwise dry slightly lighter in key) and to prevent thick paint from flaking. Gouache paints have the advantages that they dry out almost immediately to a matte finish and, if required, without visible brush marks. These qualities, with the capacities to be washed thinly or applied in thick impasto and a wide colour range that now includes fluorescent and metallic pigments, make the medium particularly suited to preparatory studies for oil and acrylic paintings. It is the medium that produces the suede finish and crisp lines characteristic of many Indian and Islamic miniatures, and it has been used in Western screen and fan decoration and by artists such as Rouault, Klee, Jean Dubuffet, Morris Graves, Jacob Lawrence, Laylah Ali, and Amy Sherald.
ENCAUSTIC
Encaustic painting (from the Greek: “burnt in”) was the ancient method, recorded by Pliny, of fixing pigments with heated wax. It was probably first practiced in Egypt about 3000 BCE and is thought to have reached its peak in Classical Greece, although no examples from that period survive. Pigments, mixed with melted beeswax, were brushed onto stone or plaster, smoothed with a metal spatula, and then blended and driven into the wall with a heated iron. The surface was later polished with a cloth. Leonardo and others attempted unsuccessfully to revive the technique. North American Indians used an encaustic method whereby pigments mixed with hot animal fat were pressed into a design engraved on smoothed buffalo hide.
CASEIN
Casein, or “cheese painting,” is a medium in which pigments are tempered with the gluey curd of cheese or milk precipitate. For handling, an emulsion of casein and lime is thinned with water. The active element of casein contains nitrogen, which forms a soluble caseate of calcium in the presence of lime. It is applied in thin washes to rigid surfaces, such as cardboard, wood, and plastered walls. Casein is also an ingredient of some charcoal and pastel fixatives and was a traditional primer for walls and panels.
Synthetic Mediums
Synthetic mediums, developed by industrial research, range from the Liquitex fabric dyes used on canvas by American abstract painter Larry Poons to the house enamel paints employed at times by Picasso and Jackson Pollock. The most popular medium and the first to challenge the supremacy of oils is acrylic resin emulsion, since this plastic paint combines most of the expressive capabilities of oils with the quick-drying properties of tempera and gouache. It is made by mixing pigments with a synthetic resin and thinning with water. It can be applied to any sufficiently toothed surface with brush, roller, airbrush, spatula, sponge, or rag. Acrylic paints dry quickly, without brush marks, to form a matte, waterproof film that is also elastic, durable, and easily cleaned. They show little colour change in drying, nor do they darken in time. While they lack the surface textural richness of oil or encaustic, they can be built up with a spatula into opaque impastos or thinned immediately into transparent colour glazes. Polyvinyl acetate (PVA) or synthetic gesso is applied for priming, although it is claimed that acrylic paints can be safely applied directly onto unprepared raw canvas or cotton. The wide range of intense hues is extended by fluorescent and metallic pigments. Polymer paints are particularly suitable for the precise, immaculate finish demanded by Op art, Minimalist, and Photo-realist painters such as Bridget Riley, Morris Louis, Frank Stella, and Richard Estes.
Other Mediums
French Pastels
French pastels, with the sharpened lumps of pigment used by Ice Age artists, are the purest and most direct painting materials. Pastel pigments are mixed only with sufficient gum to bind them for drying into stick molds. Generally, they are used on raw strawboard or on coarse-grained tinted paper, although vellum, wood, and canvas have been also employed. These colours will not fade or darken, but, since they are not absorbed by the surface of the support, they lie as pigment powder and are easily smudged. Unfortunately, pastel colours lose their luminosity and tonality if fixed with a varnish and so are best preserved in deep mounts behind glass. Edgar Degas often overcame the fragile nature of true pastel painting by the unorthodox method of working on turpentine-soaked paper, which absorbed the powdery pigment.
Oil Pastels
Oil pastels are pigments ground in mastic with a variety of oils and waxes. They are used in a similar way to that of French pastels but are already fixed and harder, producing a permanent, waxy finish. Oil-pastel paintings are generally executed on white paper, card, or canvas. The colours can be blended if the surface of the support is dampened with turpentine or if they are overworked with turpentine. They are popular for small preparatory studies for paintings.
Glass Painting
Glass paintings are executed with oil and hard resin or with watercolour and gum on glass sheets. These have been a folk art tradition in Europe and North America and, from the 15th to the 18th century, were regarded as a fine art in northern Europe, where they were revived by such painters as Willi Dirx, Ida Kerkovius, Lily Hildebrandt, Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and Heinrich Campendonck. Colours are applied from the back in reverse order. Unpainted areas of glass are often coated with mercury, providing a mirror background to the coloured images. That treatment creates the kind of illusionary, bizarre spatial relationship between the viewer and picture space sought by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto with his use of photographic images fixed to a polished steel sheet. The colours seen through glass appear translucent, jewel-like, and, since they cannot be touched, even magical.
Ivory Painting
Ivory painting was practiced in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and America for portrait miniatures. These were generally oval-shaped and designed as keepsakes, lockets, and mantle pictures. They were painted under a magnifying glass in fairly dry watercolour or tempera stippling, with sable- or marten-hair brushes on thin, semitranslucent ivory pieces. Corrections were made with a needle. The velvet quality of their colours was enhanced, on the thinner ivories, by the glow produced by a gold leaf or tinted backing.
Lacquer
Lacquer has been a traditional Chinese medium for more than 2,000 years. It combines painting with intaglio relief. Linen-covered wood panels are coated with chalk or clay, followed by many thin layers of black or red lacquer tree resin. The surface is polished and a design engraved, which is then coloured and gilded or inset with mother-of-pearl. Layers of compressed paper or molded papier-mâché have also provided supports. In China and Japan, lacquer has been used principally for decorating shrine panels, screens, caskets, panniers (large baskets), and musical instruments.
Sand or Dry Painting
Sand, or dry, painting is a traditional religious art of the North American Indians; it is still practiced in healing ceremonies among the Navajos of New Mexico and Arizona. Ground sandstone, natural ochres, mineral earths, and powdered charcoal are sprinkled onto a pattern marked into an area covered with yellow-white sand. The patient sits in the centre of this vivid symbolic design of coloured figurative and geometrical shapes. Following the ritual, the painting is destroyed. These “floor” pictures influenced Pollock in his horizontally spread action paintings.
Paper
From the end of the 18th century, profiles and full-length group portraits were cut in black paper, mounted on white card, and often highlighted in gold or white. A silhouette (“shade”) might be first outlined from the sitter’s cast shadow with the aid of a physionotrace. American artist Kara Walker revived the silhouette technique with a series of controversial works that commented on race, gender, and class.
Collage
Collage was the Dada and Synthetic Cubist technique of combining labels, tickets, newspaper cuttings, wallpaper scraps, and other “found” surfaces with painted textures. Among the most lyrical and inventive works in this magpie medium are the so-called Merz collages by Kurt Schwitters. Frottage was Max Ernst’s method of taking paper rubbings from surfaces, unrelated to one another in real life, and combining them to create fantasy landscapes. Cut paper shapes, hand coloured in gouache, were used by Matisse for his monumental last paintings; Piet Mondrian composed his famous Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–43) in coloured-paper cutouts.
Mechanical Mediums
The use of mechanical mediums in painting has run parallel to similar developments in modern music and drama. In the field of cybernetics, painters have programmed computers to permutate drawings, photographs, diagrams, and symbols through sequences of progressive distortion; and light patterns are produced on television screens by deliberate magnetic interference and by sound-wave oscillations. Artists have also explored the expressive and aesthetic possibilities of linear holograms, in which all sides of an object can be shown by superimposed light images. Painters are among those who have extended the boundaries of filmmaking as an art form. Examples include the Surrealist film fantasies created by Berthold Bartosch, Jean Cocteau, Hans Richter, and Salvador Dalí, by Schlemmer’s filmed ballets and Norman McLaren’s hand-painted abstract animations.
Mixed Medium
Some pictures are first painted in one medium and corrected or enriched with colour and texture in another. Examples of this kind of mixed mediums are the Renaissance tempera-oil technique, William Blake’s relief etchings colour-printed in glue tempera and hand-finished in watercolour, and Degas’s overpainted monotypes and his combinations of pastel, gouache, and oil. Later examples included Richard Hamilton’s photographs overpainted in oil colour, Dubuffet’s patchwork assemblages of painted canvas and paper, and Klee’s alchemy in mixing ingredients such as oil and distemper on chalk over jute and watercolour and wax on muslin stuck on wood.
FORMS OF PAINTING
Mural Painting
Mural painting has its roots in the primeval instincts of people to decorate their surroundings and to use wall surfaces as a form for expressing ideas, emotions, and beliefs. In their universal manifestation in graffiti and in ancient murals, such as cave paintings and protodynastic Egyptian frescoes, symbols and representational images have been spread freely and indiscriminately across walls, ceilings, and floors. But, in more disciplined attempts to symbolize the importance and function of particular buildings through their interior decoration, murals have been designed for the restricted framework of specific surface areas. They therefore have to be painted in close relationship to the scale, style, and mood of the interior and with regard to such siting considerations as light sources, eye levels, the spectators’ lines of sight and means of approach, and the emotive scale relationship between spectators and the painted images.
Easel And Panel Painting
The easel, or studio, picture was a form developed during the Renaissance with the establishment of the painter as an individual artist. Its scale and portability enabled European artists to extend the range of themes, previously restricted to those suitable to mural decoration. Easel and panel forms include still life, portraiture, landscape, and genre subjects and permit the representation of ephemeral effects of light and atmosphere that the more intimate forms of Asian art had already allowed the painters of scrolls, screens, and fans to express. Although easel paintings are occasionally commissioned for a special purpose, they are generally bought as independent art objects and used as focal features in private homes. They are also collected as financial investment, for social prestige, or purely for the aesthetic pleasure they afford.
Miniature Painting
Miniature painting is a term applied both to Western portrait miniatures and to the Indian and Islamic forms of manuscript painting discussed below. Portrait miniatures, or limnings, were originally painted in watercolour with body colour on vellum and card. They were often worn in jewelled, enamelled lockets. Sixteenth-century miniaturists, such as Hans Holbein the Younger, Jean Clouet, Nicholas Hilliard, and Isaac Oliver, painted them in the tradition of medieval illuminators. Their flat designs, richly textured and minutely detailed, often incorporated allegorical and gilded heraldic motifs. In 17th- and 18th-century Western portrait miniatures, the two-dimensional pattern of rich colours was developed by atmospheric tonal modeling into more naturalistic representations; these were sometimes in pastel and pencil or painted in oils on a metal base. Pantographs (reducing and enlarging copying instruments made on the lazy-tongs lever principle) might be used to transfer a drawing. Among the exponents of this naturalistic style were Francisco Goya, Fragonard, Samuel Cooper, and François Dumont. The introduction of painted ivory miniatures was followed, in the 19th century, by a change in aesthetic standards, although a classical simplicity was achieved by itinerant limners and by the German miniaturist Patricius Kittner. The painted miniature was eventually superseded by the small hand-tinted photograph.
Scroll Painting
Hand scrolls, traditional to China and Japan, are ink paintings on continuous lengths of paper or silk. They are unrolled at arm’s length and viewed from right to left. These generally represent panoramic views of rivers, mountain and urban landscapes, and domestic interiors. They also illustrate romantic novels, Daoist and Buddhist themes, and historical and genre subjects. Narrative poetic commentaries were included as integral textures in the flowing design. The scrolls are remarkable for their vitality, the lyrical representation of atmospheric space, and for the rising and dipping viewpoints that anticipate the zooming motion-picture camera. The earliest surviving scrolls, such as Gu Kaizhi’s The Admonitions of the Court Instructress, date from the 4th century CE. Asian hanging scrolls and Indian and Tibetan temple banners are forms similar to those of Western easel and panel paintings. Their subjects range from the seasons, domestic interiors, landscapes, and portraits to Vishnu epics, mandalas (symbolic diagrams of the universe), and temple icons. They are painted in ink or gouache on silk and paper and are usually mounted on embroidered or block-printed silk. The dramatic interplay of bold flattened images against the open space of an unpainted or gilded ground influenced 19th-century Western Art Nouveau.
Screen And Fan Painting
Folding screens and screen doors originated in China and Japan, probably during the 12th century (or possibly earlier), and screen painting continued as a traditional form into the 21st. They are in ink or gouache on plain or gilded paper and silk. Their vivid rendering of animals, birds, and flowers and their atmospheric landscapes brought nature indoors. In some screens each panel was designed as an individual painting, while in others a continuous pattern flowed freely across the divisions. Japanese screens were often painted in complementary yin and yang pairs. Large 12-panel Chinese coromandel lacquer screens were imported into Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries. French Rococo boudoir screens depicting fêtes champêtres (townspeople enjoying rural surroundings) and toile de Jouy (landscape or floral) pastoral themes were painted on silk or on wood panels in a flamboyantly scrolled, gilded framework. The designs of Art Nouveau screens were inspired by the Japanese tradition. Sidney Nolan’s screens on Greek themes and the pastiches of Victorian paper-scrap screens by Pop art painters were 20th century Western revivals. Traditional to the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches is the iconostasis screen, which stands between the nave and sanctuary and displays icon panel paintings representing the Virgin, the saints, and narrative subjects.
Panoramas
Panoramas were intended to simulate the sensation of scanning an extensive urban or country view or seascape. This form of painting was popular at the end of the 18th century. Notable examples are The Battle of Agincourt (1805), by R.K. Porter, and the Mesdag Panorama (1881), by Hendrik Willem Mesdag. Panoramas might be compared to Cinerama films and enjoyed as a stimulating optical entertainment, along with cyclorama drums (large pictorial representations encircling the spectator), trompe l’oeil diorama peep shows, and the show box, for which Thomas Gainsborough painted glass transparencies. More serious forms of panoramic painting are exemplified in Chinese Buddhist sanctuary frescoes, Asian hand scrolls, Dürer’s watercolour townscapes, Andrey Rublyov’s 14th-century mural of Moscow, and Uccello’s original sequence of three panels depicting the Battle of San Romano.
Modern Forms
The concept of painting as a medium for creating illusions of space, volume, texture, light, and movement on a flat, stationary support was challenged by many modern artists. Some late 20th-century forms, for example, blurred the conventional distinctions between the mediums of sculpture and painting. Sculptors such as David Smith, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Philip Sutton made multicoloured constructions; painters such as Jean Arp and Ben Nicholson created abstract designs in painted wood relief, and Richard Smith painted on three-dimensional canvas structures the surfaces of which curl and thrust toward the spectator. And, rather than deny the essential flatness of the painting support by using traditional methods of representing volume and texture, Robert Rauschenberg,Jim Dine, and Romare Bearden attached real objects and textures to the painted surface, and Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland designed their irregularly shaped canvases to be seen as explicitly flat art objects. Rejecting earlier painting methods of reproducing effects of light with tonal contrasts and broken pigment colour, some artists made use of neon tubes and mirrors. Instead of simulating sensations of movement by optical illusion, others designed kinetic panels and boxes in which coloured shapes revolved under electric power. The traditional definition of painting as a visual, concrete art form was questioned by Conceptual art, in which the painter’s idea might be expressed only in the form of documented proposals for unrealized and often unrealizable projects. In performance art and happenings, which employed techniques akin to those used in theatre, the artists themselves became a kind of medium.
Imagery And Subject Matter
The imagery and subject matter of paintings in early cultures were generally prescribed by tribal, religious, or dynastic authorities. In some Eastern countries, traditional models survived into the 18th century and even later. With the Renaissance, however, images and themes in Western painting, reflecting the new spirit of humanistic, objective curiosity and scientific research, came to be decided by the artist and patron and, in later periods, by the artist alone.
Portraiture
The earliest surviving portraits of particular persons are probably the serene, idealized faces painted on the front and inside surfaces of dynastic Egyptian sarcophagi. The human individuality of the Roman mummy portraits of the 1st and 2nd century CE, however, suggests more authentic likenesses. Although portraits are among the highest achievements in painting, the subject poses special problems for the artist commissioned to paint a notable contemporary. The portraits of patrons by artists such as Raphael, Rubens, Hyacinthe Rigaud, Antoine-Jean Gros, Jacques-Louis David, and Sir Thomas Lawrence were required to express nobility, grace, and authority, just as the sultans and rajahs portrayed on frontispieces to Persian and Indian illuminated books and albums had understandably to be flattered as benevolent despots. Such concessions to the sitter’s vanity and social position seem to have been disregarded, however, in the convincing likenesses by more objective realists such as Robert Campin, Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Velázquez, Goya, and Gustave Courbet. Probably the finest are the self-portraits and studies of ordinary people by Rembrandt and van Gogh, where psychological insight, emotional empathy, and aesthetic values are fused. A more decorative approach to the subject is seen in the flattened portraits by Holbein, the Elizabethan and itinerant American limners, and the East Asian paintings of ancestors, poets, priests, and emperors. Like these paintings, the full-length portraits by Boucher, Gainsborough, Kees van Dongen, and Matisse display as much regard for the texture and form of their sitters’ dress as for their facial features.
Genre
Genre subjects are scenes from everyday life. Hunting expeditions and rituals figure in prehistoric rock paintings. Domestic and agricultural occupations, with banquet scenes of feasting, dancing, and music, were traditional subjects for ancient Egyptian tomb murals. East Asian hand scrolls, albums, and screens brilliantly describe court ceremonies, the bustle of towns, and the hardships of the countryside. The depiction of earthly pursuits was forbidden under the strict iconography prescribed by the early Christian Church, but the later illuminated Books of Hours provide enchanting records of the festivals and occupations of northern European communities. In Renaissance painting, genre subjects were generally restricted to background features of portraits and historical narratives. Domestic scenes, however, not only provided Bruegel with subjects for moral allegories but, as with Rembrandt, were used to counterpoint the emotional intensity of a dramatic religious theme. The withdrawal of religious patronage in northern Europe directed painters toward secular subjects. The rich period of genre painting in the 17th-century Netherlands is represented by the interiors, conversation pieces, and scenes of work and play by David Teniers the Younger, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Judith Leyster, Gerard Terborch, Pieter de Hooch, Adriaen van Ostade, and, the finest, by Johannes Vermeer. Pictures of rustic life had a special appeal for collectors in 18th-century France and England; these were the somewhat picturesque representations of peasant life painted by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Boucher, George Morland, and Gainsborough. Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s paintings of servants and children, however, exhibit a timeless dignity and grandeur. The harsher realities of working life were depicted by Jean-François Millet, Daumier, Courbet, van Gogh, and Degas; the robust gaiety of cafés and music halls was captured by Toulouse-Lautrec, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and Walter Richard Sickert; and intimate domestic scenes were recorded by Bonnard and Vuillard. Genre movements from the 20th century included the American Scene painters, the Ashcan and Kitchen Sink schools (represented by such painters as George Wesley Bellows, Jack Smith, and Derrick Greaves), the Camden Town and Euston Road groups (Frederick Spencer Gore, Sir William Coldstream, and Victor Pasmore), and the Social Realists in England and in the United States (Robert Henri, Stuart Davis, and Maurice Prendergast). The trials and the vibrancy of African Americans were expressed by Archibald Motley, Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin, Faith Ringgold, and Kerry James Marshall, the latter two of whom continued to be influential in the 21st century.
Landscape
Idealized landscapes were common subjects for fresco decoration in Roman villas. Landscape painting (as exemplified by a Chinese landscape scroll by Gu Kaizhi dating from the 4th century) was an established tradition in East Asia, where themes such as the seasons and the elements held a spiritual significance. In Europe, imaginary landscapes decorated 15th-century Books of Hours. The first naturalistic landscapes were painted by Dürer and Bruegel. Landscapes appeared in most Renaissance paintings, however, only as settings to portraits and figure compositions. It was not until the 17th-century Dutch and Flemish schools—of Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema, Aelbert Cuyp, Rubens, and Hercules Seghers—that they were accepted in the West as independent subjects. The most significant developments in 19th-century painting, however, were made through the landscapes of the Impressionists and the Neo-Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Styles in landscape painting range from the tranquil, classically idealized world of Poussin and Claude, the precise, canal topography of Francesco Guardi and Canaletto and the structural analyses of Cézanne to the poetic romanticism of Samuel Palmer and the later Constables and Turners and the exultant pantheism of Rubens and van Gogh. Modern landscapes varied in approach from the Expressionism of Oskar Kokoschka’s cities and rivers, Maurice de Vlaminck’s wintry countrysides, and John Marin’s crystalline seascapes to the metaphysical country of Ernst, Dalí, and René Magritte and the semi-abstract coastlines of Nicolas de Stael, Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, and Richard Diebenkorn.
Still Life
The earliest European still-life painting is usually attributed to Jacopo de’ Barbari (i.e., Dead Bird, 1504). In Western paintings, still life often appears as a minor feature of the design; but until the 17th century it was not generally painted for its own sake, although it was already traditional to East Asian art. The subject is particularly associated with northern European painting, and the choice of objects very often has a religious or literary significance: wine, water, and bread symbolizing the Passion; skulls, hourglasses, and candles, the transience of life (a genre called vanitas); and selected flowers and fruits, the seasons. Flower painting, especially, held a spiritual and emotional meaning for Japanese artists and for 19th-century European painters, such as Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, and van Gogh. Still life has been expressed in many different ways: Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s witty arrangements of fruit, flowers, and vegetables made into fantastic allegorical heads and figures; the sensuous representation of food by Frans Snyders, Goya, and William Merritt Chase; the trompe l’oeil illusionism of Alexandre-François Desportes and William Harnett; the formal decoration of folk artists or untrained artists such as Henri Rousseau and Séraphine and of modern painters such as Matisse, Dufy, and Pat Caulfield; the semi-abstract designs of Picasso, Gris, and William Scott; and, probably at its highest level of expression, the majestic still lifes of Chardin, Cézanne, and Giorgio Morandi.
Symbolism
Most early cultures developed iconographic systems that included prescriptions for the site, design, function, form, medium, subject matter, and imagery of their painting. The siting of early Byzantine murals, for instance, echoed the symbolic, architectural planning of the basilica. Thus, a stylized, linear image of Christ, surrounded by heavenly hosts, occupied the central dome; the Virgin was represented in the apse; and stiff figures of apostles, prophets, martyrs, and patriarchs occupied the aisle walls. The format of early devotional paintings was also prescribed, Christian and Buddhist deities being placed in the focal centre of the design, above the eye level of the audience and larger than surrounding figures. And, in the conventional arrangement of a Christian subject such as the Holy Trinity, a central, bearded, patriarchal God, flanked by archangels, presented Christ on the cross; between them was a dove, representing the Holy Spirit. In a rendering of the risen Christ, the Son faced the audience, with the Virgin Mother on the left and St. John on the right of the design. In East Asia a traditional format depicted Buddha on a lotus throne or in a high chariot drawn by oxen across clouds, surrounded by figures representing the planets. Deities generally appear against undefined grounds of white (signifying eternity or nothingness), blue (the celestial vaults), or gold (representing heavenly light by radiating lines or the spiritual aura by a nimbus). The elaborate surface preparation of supports and the painstaking execution with the finest materials symbolized the intention that paintings dedicated to a deity should last forever. The imagery, subject matter, and form might also have a mystical function: the realistic rendering of animals in contrast to the perfunctory human representations in Ice Age rock paintings, thought to signify a wishful guarantee for success in hunting; the earthly pleasures depicted on ancient Egyptian tomb murals intended to secure their continuance for the deceased; and the North American Indian sand paintings designed for magic healing ceremonies and the Tantric (relating to Tantrism, a school of Mahayana Buddhism) mandalas used for meditation and enlightenment.
Symbolism in Eastern painting is intended to deepen the experience of a picture’s mood and spirituality. Both the execution and the subject matter of Buddhist Chinese and Japanese painting have a religious or metaphysical significance, the artist’s intuitive calligraphic brush movements symbolizing mystical empathy with nature and the cyclic landscape and flower subjects expressing belief in the spiritual harmony of natural forms and forces. Much of Indian symbolism is visually emotive. And, although symbolic attributes and colour codes identify Indian mythological characters (for example, the four arms of the goddess Kali and the blue skin of the divine lover Krishna), the formal character and colour scheme of settings generally reflect the narrative’s emotional mood (for example, vibrant, dark-blue, cloudy skies and embracing, purple-black glades evoking amorous anticipation and red grounds expressing the passions of love or war).
