UNIT 1
Painting is one of the oldest and most important arts. Since prehistoric times, artists have arranged paint on surfaces in ways that express their ideas about people and the world. The paintings that artists create have great value for humanity. They provide people with both enjoyment and information.
People enjoy paintings for many reasons. They may think a painting is beautiful. People may like the colours that the painter used or the way the artist arranged the paint on the surface. Some paintings interest people because of the way the artists expressed some human emotion, such as fear, grief, happiness, or love. Other paintings are enjoyable because they skillfully portray nature. Even paintings of such everyday scenes as people at work and play and of such common objects as food and flowers can be a source of pleasure.
Paintings also teach. Some reveal what the artist felt about important subjects, including death, love, religion, and social justice. Other paintings tell about the history during which they were created. The provide information about the customs, goals, and interests of the people of past societies. Paintings also tell about such things as the buildings, clothing, and tools of the past. Much about our knowledge about prehistoric and ancient times comes from painting and other arts, because many early societies left few or no written records.
All great paintings share a common feature. They do more than just reproduce with paint something that exists, existed, or can be imagined. They also express the painter’s special view about a subject. People have always been a favourite subject of painters, who have shown them in many different ways. Religious subjects dominated painting in some parts of the world for hundreds of years. A large part of all the painting ever done in Asia is religious. Medieval Europeans painted almost nothing but religious subjects. Painters of the European Renaissance, which followed the Middle Ages, painted more religious pictures than any other kind. Religious pictures tell stories about gods and holy people and teach moral lessons. Many artists turn to nature for their subject matter. They paint scenes called landscapes and seascapes that try to capture the many moods of nature. Still lifes are pictures of objects. Still-life painters usually make no attempt to tell a story or express an idea. Instead, they are interested in the objects themselves – their colour, shape, surface, and the space within or around them. History, mythology, and social expression are another subject matter, which artists often find in the past. Such paintings are intended to recall past deeds of glory or to teach a lesson. Many artists have used paintings to express political and social belifs and to protest against such things as war and poverty.
Many paintings have been created to decorate rooms or buildings. The subject matter of most of these paintings is less important than the painting’s place within the total scheme of decoration.
Paintings consist of many artistic elements. The most important elements include (1) colour, (2) line, (3) mass, (4) space, (5) texture. These artistic elements are as important to a painter as words are to an author. By stressing certain elements, a painter can make a picture easier to understand or bring out some particular mood or theme. For example, an artist can combine certain colours and lines in a picture to produce an intensely emotional feeling. The same artistic elements can also be combined in a different way in order to produce a feeling of peace and relaxation.
Colour can help an artist tell a story, express an emotion, or create a composition. Sometimes an artist does not colour all the forms as they would appear in real life. Instead, he would use strong primary colours – such as blue, red, and yellow – in the parts of the painting he would like to emphasize. He would balance his colours with delicate black, brown, gray, tan, and white colors. The result is a pleasing composition, created largely by the painter’s skillful arrangement of colours.
Line is the chief means by which most artists build up the forms in their pictures. By combining lines of different lengths and different directions, an artist makes a drawing. The addition of paint makes the drawing a painting. Artists use lines to show the edges of the figures and objects. Some lines are thick and some are thin. With them, an artist emphasizes line to make the viewer aware of the roundness and delicacy of forms or their roughness.
Mass allows an artist to express the feeling of weight in a painting. Sometimes a painter can create a picture largely in terms of mass, when an artist makes his objects look as if they are made of stone or some other heavy material to make them seem like monuments that will last a ling time.
Space can be created by arranging lines, colours, and light and dark areas in certain ways – even though he really paints on a small flat surface. An artist can make an object look flat or solid, and either close or far away.
Texture refers to the appearance of the painting’s surface. The paint of a picture may be thick and rough or thin and smooth. A rough texture is created by using thick strokes of paint and it would add to a definite emotional feeling of the painting.
Painting materials are many. An artist makes a picture by spreading paint on a surface, such as a wall or a piece of fabric, paper, or wood. The appearance of the picture is affected by the surface on which it is painted, the kind of paint that is used, and the liquid that is used to thin the paint. Paints are made by mixing dry powdered colours called pigments with sticky substances called binders. As the binder dries or hardens, it holds the pigment to the picture surface. Artists use paint thinners (also called painting mediums) along with pigments and binders. Artists use brushes and painting knives to put paint on the picture surface. Brushes come in many lengths and shapes, allowing artists to produce various kinds of strokes. A piece of fabric on which a picture is made is called a canvas, which sits on an easel.
Fresco painting is a technique in which the artist paints on a plastered wall while the plaster is still damp. An artist who paints a wall picture on dry plaster uses a process called secco painting. Fresco artists decorate both inside and outside walls. Their works contribute greatly to the beauty of buildings and homes. Fresco painting is especially well suited to decorating large walls in churches, government buildings, and palaces. A fresco, unlike many other painting techniques, has no glossy shine. A shine would make a fresco difficult to see from certain angles.
Water colour painting can be done in two major techniques – transparent water colour and gouache. Transparent water colours are paints made of pigments combined with a gum Arabic binder. An artist using this technique lightens the colours by adding water to them. Gouache paint is also made with a gum Arabic binder/ but during the manufacturing process, a little white pigment or chalk is added to make the paint opaque. Opaque means that the viewer cannot see through a layer of the colour. An artist using the gouache technique makes the colours lighter by adding white paint to them.
Pastels are coloured chalk sticks. Many artists who draw especially well like to work in pastel because they can use the stick like a pencil while producing brilliant effects of colour. Pastel paintings are noted for their delicate colours.
Tempera is sometimes used as a general term for water colours. However, the word tempera more often refers to a technique in which egg yolk is the binder. In a tempera painting lines are sharp and clear. Tones are bright, and exact and strong.
Oil paint is made by mixing powdered pigments with a binder of vegetable oil. Certain features of oil paint make it popular with artists who want to show the natural appearance of the world around them. Oil paint dries slowly. Therefore, the artist has time to blend the strokes into each other carefully and to adjust the colour mixtures to reproduce natural appearance. Oil paint – even when applied thickly – does not crack so easily as does water paint or egg tempera. As a result, the painter can apply oil paint in varying thicknesses to produce a wide range of textures.
Today, artists most frequently use two synthetic resins – acrylic and vinyl. These paints can be used on a wide variety of surfaces, including cardboard, paper, fabric, and wood. Colours can be painted over each other rapidly because they dry and form a waterproof surface almost immediately. An artist using acrylic or vinyl paints can produce effects that cannot be produced with traditional painting materials.
(Abridged from: World Book, Painting)