The art of painting

Painting is one of the most respected forms of art, ever since the ancient of times. One of the most important factors in the evolution of painting has been the appearance of new pigments, followed closely by the invention of new painting tools. Throughout time, artists have let themselves influenced by many things, creating genuine masterpieces.

Paintings are artworks resulting from the application of pigments onto different surfaces, with the help of a brush, palette knives or even fingers. When we think of great works of art, we often think of paintings. Works by great painters like Michelangelo, Picasso and Dali are now part of history.

Some of the earliest examples of art of any kind that we have are paintings, such as the prehistoric Lascaux cave paintings in France. They were painted on cave walls using pigments derived from soil and minerals, and often portrayed animals hunted by our ancestors.

One might easily chart the history of painting analyzing different artistic movements and their connection to historical and ideological forces. The classical beauty of Renaissance painting came from a rediscovery of ancient Greece and Rome, while the deliberate nonsense of Dadaist art emerged from the horror and disillusionment following the First World War. However, one of the most important factors is the nature of the medium itself. The type of paint and brushes used by an artist are at least as important as the creative ideas.

In China, painters and scribes used the same type of ink and similar brushes. Many artists also painted their works on large sheets of paper rather than on wood or cloth (though many lovely examples of Chinese paintings on silk are left for our enjoyment today). Thus, in Chinese art, the line between calligraphy and painting is particularly blurry.

In the West, on the other hand, the dominant types of paints are watercolors and oils. Watercolor paintings tend to have light, translucent colors, as opposed to the richer, more opaque tints of oil paintings. The characteristics of watercolors have influenced the development of early hand-drawn animated cartoons. Walt Disney Company’s Snow White is a prime example. Throughout the movie, one can see the glow of the white paper through the paint, which gives the entire film a feeling of brightness. The fact that watercolors tend to dry much more quickly than oil paintings also made hand-drawn animation more feasible, given that twenty-four drawings are needed for each second of film.

We may also say that the characteristics of oil-based paint helped pave the way for abstract paintings. The thick consistency of oil painting allows for it to be applied onto the canvas in thick globs for the impasto effect. When paint can have visible texture and weight on the canvas the way oil paint does, paintings may more easily be moved away from representative to more abstract art. In such paintings, we can say that the medium itself, rather than the subject matter represented, is the message.

The nature of painting continues to evolve, facilitated by improvements in art-related information technology. With the rise of digital art, artists are sure to discover new types of pigment on new “canvases.”

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