Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium[1] to a solid surface The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used. The final work is also called a painting.
Painting is an important form in the visual arts, bringing in elements such as drawing, gesture (as in gestural painting), composition, narration (as in narrative art), or abstraction(as in abstract art).[2] Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life or landscape painting), photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic (as in Symbolist art), emotive (as in Expressionism), or political in nature (as in Artivism).
A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by religious art. Examples of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythologicalfigures on pottery, to Biblical scenes Sistine Chapel ceiling, to scenes from the life of Buddha or other images of Eastern religious origin.
In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. The support for paintings includes such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, pottery, leaf, copper and concrete, and the painting may incorporate multiple other materials including sand, clay, paper, plaster, gold leaf, as well as objects.
Color and tone
Color, made up of hue, saturation, and value, dispersed over a surface is the essence of painting, just as pitch and rhythm are the essence of music. Color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but in the East, white is. Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe,[3] Kandinsky,[4] and Newton,[5] have written their own color theory.
Moreover, the use of language is only an abstraction for a color equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations from the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a formalized register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as F or C♯. For a painter, color is not simply divided into basic (primary) and derived (complementary or mixed) colors (like red, blue, green, brown, etc.).
Painters deal practically with pigments,[6] so "blue" for a painter can be any of the blues: phthalocyanine blue, Prussian blue, indigo, Cobalt blue, ultramarine, and so on. Psychological and symbolical meanings of color are not, strictly speaking, means of painting. Colors only add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this, the perception of a painting is highly subjective. The analogy with music is quite clear—sound in music (like a C note) is analogous to "light" in painting, "shades" to dynamics, and "coloration" is to painting as the specific timbre of musical instruments is to music. These elements do not necessarily form a melody (in music) of themselves; rather, they can add different contexts to it.
Aesthetics is the study of art and beauty; it was an important issue for 18th- and 19th-century philosophers such as Kant and Hegel. Classical philosophers like Plato and Aristotlealso theorized about art and painting in particular. Plato disregarded painters (as well as sculptors) in his philosophical system; he maintained that painting cannot depict the truth—it is a copy of reality (a shadow of the world of ideas) and is nothing but a craft, similar to shoemaking or iron casting.[17] By the time of Leonardo, painting had become a closer representation of the truth than painting was in Ancient Greece. Leonardo da Vinci, on the contrary, said that "Italian: La Pittura è cosa mentale" ("English: painting is a thing of the mind").[18] Kant distinguished between Beauty and the Sublime, in terms that clearly gave priority to the former.[citation needed] Although he did not refer to painting in particular, this concept was taken up by painters such as J.M.W. Turnerand Caspar David Friedrich.
Hegel recognized the failure of attaining a universal concept of beauty and, in his aesthetic essay, wrote that painting is one of the three "romantic" arts, along with Poetryand Music, for its symbolic, highly intellectual purpose.[19][20] Painters who have written theoretical works on painting include Kandinsky and Paul Klee.[21][22] In his essay, Kandinsky maintains that painting has a spiritual value, and he attaches primary colorsto essential feelings or concepts, something that Goethe and other writers had already tried to do.
Iconography is the study of the content of paintings, rather than their style. Erwin Panofsky and other art historians first seek to understand the things depicted, before looking at their meaning for the viewer at the time, and finally analyzing their wider cultural, religious, and social meaning.[23]
In 1890, the Parisian painter Maurice Denisfamously asserted: "Remember that a painting—before being a warhorse, a naked woman or some story or other—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order."[24] Thus, many 20th-century developments in painting, such as Cubism, were reflections on the means of painting rather than on the external world—nature—which had previously been its core subject. Recent contributions to thinking about painting have been offered by the painter and writer Julian Bell. In his book What is Painting?, Bell discusses the development, through history, of the notion that paintings can express feelings and ideas.In Mirror of The World, Bell writes:
Rhythm, for artists such as Piet Mondrian,[8][9]is important in painting as it is in music. If one defines rhythm as "a pause incorporated into a sequence", then there can be rhythm in paintings. These pauses allow creative force to intervene and add new creations—form, melody, coloration. The distribution of form, or any kind of information is of crucial importance in the given work of art, and it directly affects the aesthetic value of that work. This is because the aesthetic value is functionality dependent, i.e. the freedom (of movement) of perception is perceived as beauty. Free flow of energy, in art as well as in other forms of "techne", directly contributes to the aesthetic value.[8]
Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music is abstract by nature—it does not try to represent the exterior world, but expresses in an immediate way the inner feelings of the soul. Wassily Kandinsky often used musical terms to identify his works; he called his most spontaneous paintings "improvisations" and described more elaborate works as "compositions". Kandinsky theorized that "music is the ultimate teacher,"[10] and subsequently embarked upon the first seven of his ten Compositions. Hearing tones and chords as he painted, Kandinsky theorized that (for example), yellow is the color of middle C on a brassy trumpet; black is the color of closure, and the end of things; and that combinations of colors produce vibrational frequencies, akin to chords played on a piano. In 1871 the young Kandinsky learned to play the piano and cello.[11][12] Kandinsky's stage design for a performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition illustrates his "synaesthetic" concept of a universal correspondence of forms, colors and musical sounds.[13]
Music defines much of modernist abstract painting. Jackson Pollock underscores that interest with his 1950 painting Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
Non-traditional elements EditModern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, as one example, collage, which began with Cubism and is not painting in the strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as metal, plastic, sand, cement, straw, leaves or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer. There is a growing community of artists who use computers to "paint" color onto a digital "canvas" using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required.
Jean Metzinger's mosaic-like Divisionisttechnique had its parallel in literature; a characteristic of the alliance between Symbolist writers and Neo-Impressionist artists:
