Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color, or other medium to a surface or support base. The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term describes both the act and the result which is called a painting. Paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay, copper, or concrete, and may incorporate multiple other materials including sand, clay, paper, gold leaf as well as objects.
Painting is a mode of expression and the forms are numerous. Drawing, composition, or abstraction and other aesthetics may serve to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the artist. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational such as landscape painting or abstract and may be loaded with narrative content, symbolism, emotion, or be political in nature.
Elements of Painting
 Intensity - What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity. Every point in space has different intensity, which can be represented in painting by black and white and all the gray shades between.
Color and Tone - Color and tone are the essence of painting as pitch and rhythm are of music. Color has 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.
Painters deal practically with pigments, so "blue" for a painter can be any of the blues: phtalocyan, Paris blue, indigo, cobalt, ultramarine, and so on. Colors add to the potential, derived context of meanings, and because of this the perception of a painting is highly subjective.
Rhythm - Rhythm is important in painting as well as 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.
Non-Traditional Elements - Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example, collage, which began with Cubism and is not painting in the strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood to add texture to their paintings. |
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