Painting: Putting Color on a Surface

The first painting known to man are the Grotte Chauvet in France that many historians claim are approximately thirty-two thousand years old and are engraved and painted with the help of red ochre and black pigment. These early paintings depict horses, rhinos, lions, buffalos as well as humans taking part in hunts. Also, many a cave painting had been found in France, China, Australia, Spain and Portugal.

Putting color to a surface that includes paper, canvas, glass and wood is known as painting. There is however, another meaning to painting that may, in an artistic sense, allude to it being used in conjunction with drawing and composition to express a concept as intended by the practitioner.

In any case, it is a way to represent as well as document and express different intents and there could be any subject that the painter may want to represent through his or her craft and these may include still life, landscape or abstract and even symbolism and emotional or political subjects.

Depicting Spiritual Needs of the Painter

Many a painting has its origins in the spiritual needs of the painter being expressed and they may depict mythological figures or biblical scenes or depictions of the human body itself. Important features of painting are color as well as tone and color that can have a deeply psychological effect on the beholder, though different cultures may see them in different light. Black may be associated with mourning in one culture while other cultures may not quite perceive it as such.

There are also many modern artists that practice painting as a collage that began with Cubism and may not be considered to be painting in a strict sense.

There are other painters that make use of many different materials including sand, straw, cement or wood for their texture. Nowadays, it is considered to be an art form that is dead for all purposes since it has changed course away from the historic values and moved more into depicting concepts rather than craft and documentation.

Modern and contemporary paintings include works by Die Brucke, Edvard Munch, Ernst Kirchner as well as Egon Schiele. Other painters who are famous from the post second world war era are Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein who have tried to incorporate popular and mass culture into fine art.

More recently, during the 60s and 70s, there was a reaction against painting and many accused it of having sold out to consumerism as well as commodification and artists such as Ad Reinhardt even announced the ‘death of painting.’ However, today it has an exalted position and it is an open playing field that is more united than ever before.