What is Water Colour?

May 9th, 2011

Water colour is a kind of colour pigment ground in gum, usually gum arabic, and applied with brush and water to a painting surface, usually paper; the term also refers to a work of art executed in this medium. The pigment is ordinarily transparent but can be made opaque by mixing with a whiting and in this form is known as body colour, or gouache. It can also be mixed with casein, a phosphoprotein of milk.

Watercolour can compete in range and variety with any other painting method. Transparent watercolour allows for a freshness and luminosity in its washes and for a deft calligraphic brushwork that makes it a most alluring medium. There is one basic difference between transparent watercolour and all other heavy painting mediums, its transparency. The oil painter can apply one opaque colour over another until he has made his preferred result. The whites are created with opaque white. The watercolourist’s approach is the complete. In essence, instead of adding in he leaves out. The paper itself creates the whites. The darker accents may be painted on the paper with the pigment as it is squeezed out of the tube or with very little water mixed with it. Otherwise the colours are thinned with water. The greater amount of water in the wash, the more the paper influences the colours; for example, vermilion, a warm red, will gradually turn into a cool pink as it is thinned with more water.

The dry-brush technique, the application of the brush containing pigment but little water, dragged over the coarse surface of the paper—creates various granular effects similar to those of crayon sketch. Whole compositions can be produced in this way. This technique may also be brushed over dull washes to enliven them.

Three hundred years before the Renaissance of late 18th-century English watercolourists, Albrecht Dürer had anticipated their method of transparent colour washes in a stunning series of plant studies and panoramic landscapes. Until the emergence of the English school, however, watercolour became a medium merely for colour tinting outlined drawings or, combined with opaque body colour to produce effects similar to gouache (see below Gouache) or tempera, was used in preliminary sketches for oil paintings.

The most well known pracitioners of the English method were Thomas Girtin, John Sell Cotman, John Robert Cozens, Richard Parkes Bonington, David Cox, and Constable. Their contemporary J.M.W. Turner, however, true to his unorthodox genius, added white to his watercolour and utilized rags, sponges, and knives to create stunning effects of light and texture. Victorian artists, such as Birket Foster, used a time consuming form of colour washing a monochrome underpainting, similar in principle to the tempera-oil technique. Following the direct, vigorous watercolours of the French Impressionists and Postimpressionists, however, the medium was fully established in Europe and America as an expressive artistic medium in its own right. Notable 20th-century watercolourists have been Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Dufy, and Georges Rouault; the U.S. artists Thomas Eakins, Maurice Prendergast, Charles Burchfield, John Marin, Lyonel Feininger, and Jim Dine; and the English painters John and Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Edward Burra, and Patrick Procktor.

In the “pure” watercolour technique, often referred to as the English method, no white or other opaque colour is applied, colour intensity and tonal depth being built up by successive, transparent washes on wet paper. Parts of white paper are left untouched to represent white objects and to create effects of reflected light. These flecks of untouched paper produce the sparkle characteristic of pure watercolour. Tonal gradations and soft, atmospheric qualities are rendered by staining the paper when it is very wet with differing proportions of pigment. Sharp accents, lines, and coarse textures are introduced after the paper has dried. The paper should be of the type sold as “handmade from rags”; this is generally thick and grained. Cockling is avoided when the surface dries out if the dampened paper has been first stretched across a special frame or held in position during painting by an edging of adhesive tape.

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Oil Paints and Painting

October 26th, 2010

Artists’ oil colours are put together by stirring dry powder pigments with selected refined linseed oil until the mixture reaches a stiff paste thickness and then grinding it by powerful friction in steel roller mills. The perfection of the colour is important. The common feel is a smooth, buttery paste, rather than stringy or long or tacky. When a flowing or mobile quality is needed by the artist, a liquid painting medium like pure gum turpentine has to be mixed with the substance. If the artist needs to accelerate drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, is often used.

First-grade brushes are available in two types: red sable (from different members of the weasel species) and bleached hog bristles. They can be purchased in numbered sizes for any of four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat shape but shorter and not as supple), and oval (flat shape but bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are generally preferred for the smoother, detailed kind of brushwork. The painting knife, a thinly tempered, thin version of an art palette knife, is a useful utensil for applying oil colours in a robust manner.

The standard support for an oil painting is a canvas from pure European linen of stable close weave. This canvas is cut to the necessary size and stretched over a frame, commonly wood, to which it is then secured by use of tacks or, since the 20th century, by use of staples. If the artist desires to reduce the absorbency of the canvas fabric itself and attain a smooth surface, a primer or ground will be applied and given time to dry prior to painting. The most typically employed primers for this have been gesso, rabbit-skin glue, and lead white. If stiffness and a smooth texture are preferred rather than elasticity and texture, a wooden or processed paperboard panel, sized or primed, would be employed. A number of other supports, including paper and varying textiles and metals, have also been tried out.

A layer of paint varnish is commonly applied to a completed oil painting to prevent atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, and injurious accumulation of dirt. This paint varnish might be removed without damage by experts with isopropyl alcohol and other ordinary solvents. The varnish film also brings the surface to a consistent lustre and sets the tone and colour intensity really to the level originally created by the artist in wet paint. Some painters, particularly those who do not favour deep, intense colouring, and prefer a mat, or lustreless, finish in their paintings.

Most oil paintings created prior to the 19th century were done in layers. The first was a blank, uniform field of thinned paint called a ground. The ground subdued the gleaming white of the primer and established a base of gentle colour on which to build images. The shapes and figures in the painting were roughly blocked in by using shades of white, and gray or neutral green, red, or brown. The eventuating mass of monochromatic colours were termed the underpainting. Forms could be further defined by using either solid paint or scumbles; non-uniform, thinly applied layers of opaque pigment that imparts a whole lot of effects. At the completion stage, transparent layers of pure colour known as glazes could be employed to cast luminosity, depth, and brilliance to the figures, and highlights could be imparted with thick, textured patches of paint called impastos.

Oil as a medium of painting is recorded circa the 11th century. The technique of easel painting with oil colours, however, resulted directly from 15th-century tempera-painting styles. Essential improvements in the refining of linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents from 1400 coincided with a requirement for some medium other than pure egg-yolk tempera, to meet the contemporary requirements of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). Originally, oil paints and varnishes would be used to glaze tempera panels, painted from the usual linear draftsmanship. The technically vibrant, crystal-like portraits of the 15th-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck, for example, were done with this new technique.

Throughout the 16th century, oil paint emerged as the basic painting material in Venice. At the beginning of the 17th century, Venetian painters had become proficient in utilising the basic elements of oil painting, notably in their employment of successive layers of glazing. Linen canvas, after a long era of growth, replaced wooden panels as the most commonly used support.

One of the 17th-century masters of the oil technique was Velázquez, a Spanish artist in the Venetian tradition, whose supremely economical but sure brushstrokes have commonly been copied, particularly in portraiture. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens challenged the norm in the manner in which he loaded the light colours opaquely, in juxtaposition to his thin, transparent darks and shadows. Another remarkable 17th-century master of oil painting was the Dutch painter Rembrandt. In his art, a single brushstroke could effectively depict form; cumulative strokes give great textural depth, with a combination of the rough and the smooth, the thick and the thin. A technique of loaded whites and transparent darks is finally enhanced by glazed effects, blendings, and highly controlled impastos.

Other basic influences on the techniques of easel painting are the smooth, thinly painted, deliberately planned, tight styles of painting. A great many admired works (e.g., like those of Johannes Vermeer) were created with smooth gradations and blends of shades to cast shadowed forms and delicate colour variations.

The technical requirements of some schools of modern painting cannot be realized with traditional genres and techniques, however, and many abstract painters – and some contemporary painters who use this traditional style – have expressed a desire for a wholly different plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be had from oil paint and its conventional additives. Some desire a larger variation of thick and/or thin applications and a speedier rate of drying. Some of them have mixed coarsely grained substances with the colours to create textures, some of them use oil paints in much heavier volume than ever before, and a large part have begun to favour acrylic paints, as they are more versatile and dry rapidly.

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What is Sculpture?

October 12th, 2010

Sculpture is an art form in which hard or plastic materials are molded into three-D objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that can vary from tableaux to contexts that envelop the spectator. A variety of material are used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials are carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined.

Sculpture is not a fixed brand that applies to a permanently restricted category of objects or range of activities. It is, rather, an art that is growing and is changing and is continually extending the range of activities and evolving new kinds of objects. The breadth of the term became much wider in the second part of the 20th century than as it had been only two or three decades previously, and in the everchanging state of the visual arts at the start of the 21st century, no one can predict what its future possibilities are going to see.

There are a few features which in previous centuries were considered to be essential to sculpture but are now no longer present in a large part of modern sculpture and can no longer form part of a definition. One of the most elementary points of these is representation. Before the 20th century, sculpture was seen as a representational art; imitating forms in life, most often human figures but also inanimate objects, like game, utensils, and books. Since the turn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also included nonrepresentational forms. It has long been accepted that forms of such functional 3D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings may be expressive and beautiful without having to be representational. It was only from the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3-D works of art began to be an art form in and of themselves.

Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as essentially an art of solid form, or mass. Though the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows underneath and between its solid forms — have generally been to some degree an inextricable part of its design, but their role was secondary. In a good part of modern sculpture, however, the focus has broadened, and the spatial roles have started to come out as dominant. Spatial sculpture is currently a fully recognised branch of sculpture.

It was also taken for granted in the past ideas of sculpture that its components were of a constant shape and size and, with the exception of works such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), would not move. With the contemporary development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can still be considered inherent to sculpture.

Additionally, sculpture during the 20th century has not been confined to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to any traditional natural materials including stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. As today’s sculptors might use any materials and methods of manufacture that they want, the art form can no longer be identified by any special kind of materials or techniques.

Through all these changes, there is probably only one element that stayed constant in the art form, and it exists as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art of sculpture is a part of the visual arts that is specially concerned with the creation of objects in 3D.

Sculpture might be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round is a separate, detached piece in its own right, with an independent existence in reality as a human body or a chair. A relief does not exist in this reality. It is part of and projects from or is an inextricable part of an object that can serve either as a background against which it is set or a matrix from whence it emerges.

The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round limits its scope in certain respects compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture will not have the illusion of space with simple optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as painting can. However, it does possess a kind of reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied to the pictorial arts. The forms of sculpture are tangible as well as visible, and may appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual senses. Even the visually impaired, and those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate certain sorts of sculpture. It was, in fact, pressed by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be seen as primarily an art of touch and that the beginnings of sculptural sensibility can be based in the pleasure that we experience in fondling things.

All three-dimensional forms are regarded as exhibiting an expressive character along with purely geometric properties. They come across to the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and such. By exploiting the emotive qualities of form, sculptors are able to create imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness of form are mutually reinforcing. These images go beyond the simple presentation of fact and imply a huge range of subtle and powerful emotions.

The aesthetic raw material in this form is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive three-dimensional form. A sculpture may draw upon what we see exists in the endless variety of natural and man-made form, or it might be an art of genuine invention. It has been mastered to express a huge range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the terribly violent and ecstatic.

All human beings, intimately involved from birth with the world of three-dimensional form, realise something of its structural and expressive elements and develop emotional responses to them. This combination of intellect and sensitivity, also known as a sense of form, may be cultivated and refined. It is to that sense of form that this form of art primarily appeals.

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