Painting

Painting is the practice of applying pigment suspended in a carrier (or medium) and a binding agent (a glue) to a surface (support) such as paper, canvas or a wall. This is done by a painter; this term is used especially if this is his or her profession. Evidence indicates that humans have been painting for about 6 times as long as they have been using written language.

Drawing, by comparison, is the process of making marks on a surface by applying pressure from or moving a tool on the surface.

History Of Painting

The oldest known paintings are at the Grotte Chauvet in France, dated at about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, and mammoth. There are examples of cave painting all over the world.

Painting Techniques

Children decorate pieces of glazed porcelain at the Augarten Manufaktur, Leopoldstadt, Vienna. Painting is usually taken up at pre-school age.

Painting techniques include :

w Impasto
w Computer painting (Digital)
w Glaze
w Grisaille
w New materials (painting)
w Pointillism (aka divisionism, 'stippling')
w Scumble
w Sfumato
w Sumi-e
w Wash
w Brush Painting
w Fingerpainting
w (Partially) destructive techniques like grattage and peinture brul?e, with which    Joan Mir?, among others, experimented.

Painting Supports

w Canvas
w Panel painting
w Mural (Walls)
w Paper

Painting Media

There is a wide variety of artists' paints available for the professional or amateur artist.Different types of paint are usually identified by the medium that the pigment is suspended or embedded in, which determines the general working characteristics of the paint, such as viscosity, miscibility, solubility, drying time, etc.

Examples include :

w Acrylic
w Encaustic (wax)
w Fresco
w Gouache
w Ink
w Oil
w Heat-set oils
w Water miscible oil paints
w Pastel, including dry pastels, oil pastels, and pastel pencils
w Spray paint (Graffiti)
w Tempera
w Watercolor

Philosophy Of Painting

Much theory of art is connected with painting. In 1890, the Parisian painter Maurice Denis famously asserted: "Remember that a painting - before being a warhorse, a naked woman or some story or other - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order." Thus many twentieth century developments in painting, such as Cubism, were reflections on the business of painting rather than on the external world, nature, which had previously been its core subject.

A recent contribution to thinking about painting was offered by Julian Bell, in his book What is Painting?. A painter himself, Bell discusses the development, through history, of the notion that paintings can express feelings and ideas. The text is witty and sometimes caustic in order to make his points ("Let us be brutal: expression is a joke. Your painting expresses - for you; but it does not communicate to me. You had something in mind, something you wanted to 'bring out'; but looking at what you have done, I have no certainty that I know what it was...").