Mediums In Art: The Mystery Of Painting
Painting is all around us. Everyone has a favourite painting and it is something we all secretly wish we could do. Painting is one of the oldest art forms. It remains a mystery for most people on how the image finds its way onto the canvas. Great paintings are instantly recognizable. Great painter’s names are remembered for their ability to render the human form and the world. Before the age of the camera, film, and the advent of television, painting was how human beings saw themselves and their world.
Types of Paint
Types of media commonly used in painting are Acrylic paint, Enamel paint, Fresco, Gesso, Glaze, Gouache, Ink, Latex paint, Magna paint, Oil paint, Primer, Sumi, Tempera Vinyl Paint and Watercolor.
What To Paint On
Common media used to paint on or ground media are: Buildings, canvas, cloth, glass metal paper and wood.
Painting Tools
Tools for painting are: the brush, the stick (in ancient times), aerosol, batik, and fingers!
Painting History
This history of painting reaches all the way back to the cavemen, when they painted on the walls of their caves. The oldest paintings are located in Grotte, Chauvet in France- they are said to be about 32,000 years old.
Cave paintings have been found all over the world in Australia, Spain, Egypt, Greece, India and China. China in particular has a strong history of painting as well as calligraphy and printmaking which are closely related to painting.
Chinese painting has an emphasis on white or negative space as well as precision and elegance. The earliest Chinese paintings date back to 221-400 BC and are on silk, brick, rock and stone. India also has a long tradition of painting with their earliest paintings dating back to 5500 BC. Indian painting was mostly concerned with deities and is miniature in dimension.
The ancient Greeks were very civilized and understood the importance of painting. Ancient Greek society is depicted in the scenes on vases as well as smaller paintings on wood. Egyptians believed storing paintings with a dead body made the afterlife a better place.
The rise of religion after the death of Christ gave the west the majority of their subject matter and this is seen in painting up until the 1600 when dignitaries, aristocrats, and country scenes begin to take the place of religion as the sole subject in painting. The Renaissance is said to be the golden age of painting with many spectacular works created, Botticelli’s Venus, Leonardo Da Vinci’s fresco on The Sistine Chapel’s ceiling and Raphael’s Little Angels to name but a few.
The Baroque and Rococo period of revelry and human drama gave way to the 19th century’s nature based era of Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and the muted tones of Impressionism. Pioneers in the late 19th and early 20th century blew up the art scene with their wild shapes, colors and abstract painting style. Examples of this style are Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Picasso.
The Modern period in painting begins in 1950 with Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper , Charles Sheeler, De Kooning and Lucien Freud. It is characterized by clarity of form, no form, subject, no subject and colour. Nowadays, anything goes!
Find your favourite paintings at:
http://www.mfa.org/
http://www.louvre.fr/llv/commun/home.jsp?bmLocale=en
http://www.metmuseum.org/
By Melissa Montgomery
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