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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 an artwork executed in this medium. The pigment is ordinarily transparent but can be turned opaque by blending 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 compare in range and variety with any other painting method. Transparent watercolour allows for a vibrance and luminosity in its washes and for a deft calligraphic brushwork that makes it a most alluring medium. If there is one basic difference between transparent watercolour and all other heavy painting mediums, its transparency. The oil painter can paint one opaque colour over another until he has made his preferred result. The whites are created with an opaque white. The watercolourist’s approach is the opposite. In essence, instead of adding in he leaves out. The paper itself creates the whites. The darkest accents may be applied on the paper with the pigment as it is squeezed out of the tube or with a small amount of water mixed with it. Otherwise the colours are thinned with water. The more water in the wash, the more the paper absorbs the colours; for example, vermilion, a warm red, will eventually turn into a cool pink as it is diluted with more water.
The dry-brush technique, the use of the brush containing pigment but little water, dragged over the rough surface of the paper—creates various granular effects similar to those of a crayon drawing. Entire compositions can be made in this way. This technique also may be brushed over dull washes to enliven them.
Three hundred years before the golden age of late 18th-century English watercolourists, Albrecht Dürer had predicted their technique of transparent colour washes in a groundbreaking 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 studies for oil paintings.
The most well known formulators 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 used rags, sponges, and knives to craft unique impressions of light and texture. Victorian painters, such as Birket Foster, used a laborious method 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 picture 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 damp paper. Patches of white paper are left unpainted 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 varying proportions of pigment. Sharp accents, lines, and coarse textures are introduced when 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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Artists’ oil colours are made by adding dry powder pigments with particular refined linseed oil until it reaches a stiff paste thickness and grinding it under harsh friction in steel roller mills. The smoothness of the hue is essential. The usual standard is a smooth, buttery paste, as opposed to stringy or long or tacky. When a more flowing or mobile aspect is required by the artist, a liquid painting medium like pure gum turpentine needs to be added with it. If the artist wishes to expediate drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, might be occasionally used.
First-rate brushes are produced in two kinds: red sable (hair from numerous members of the weasel species) and chemically whitened hog bristles. They both are made in in numbered sizes for four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat shape but is shorter and not so supple), and oval (flat but bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are generally preferred for the smoother, more detailed type of brushstroke. The painting knife, a declicately tempered, thin version of an art palette knife, is a common item for applying oil colours in a robust manner.
The standard support for an oil painting is a canvas from pure European linen of strong close weave. A canvas is cut to the required size and stretched over a frame, mostly wood, and secured with tacks or, during the 20th century, with staples. If the artist wants to reduce the absorbency of the canvas and achieve a smooth surface, a primer or ground will be applied and allowed to dry before painting. The most typically employed primers for this have been gesso, rabbit-skin glue, and lead white. If density and a smooth texture are preferred to elasticity and texture, a wooden or processed paperboard panel, sized or primed, can be used. A number of other supports, for example paper and different textiles and metals, have also been used.
A coat of painting varnish is generally given to a finished oil painting to prevent any atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, and an harmful accumulation of dirt. This painting varnish may be taken off safely by experts with isopropyl alcohol and other ordinary solvents. The film varnish also sets the surface to a uniform lustre and takes the tone depth and colour intensity really to the appearance first created by the artist in wet paint. Some painters today, in particular those who don’t favour deep, intense colouring, and prefer a mat, or lustreless, finish in the oil paintings.
The majority of oil paintings from previous to the 19th century were done in layers. The first would be a blank, uniform field of thinned paint known as a ground. The ground subdued the glaring white of the primer and allowed a base of gentle colour on which to apply oil paint. The shapes and objects in the painting were roughly blocked in with shades of white, as well as gray or neutral green, red, or brown. The eventuating mass of monochromatic light and dark shades were termed the underpainting. Forms could then be defined using either ordinary paint or scumbles; irregular, thinly applied layers of opaque pigment that can create a whole lot of pictorial effects. For the completion stage, transparent layers of pure colour called glazes could be utilised to cast luminosity, depth, and brilliance to the shapes, and highlights would be imparted with thick, textured patches of paint known as impastos.
Oil as a medium for painting is dated back to the 11th century. The method of easel painting with oil colours, however, came directly from 15th-century tempera-painting techniques. Essential improvements in how to refine linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents post 1400 coincided with a desire for mediums other than pure egg-yolk tempera, in meeting the contemporary needs of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). Originally, oil paints and varnishes would be used to glaze tempera panels, painted in their common linear draftsmanship. The technically vibrant, gem-like paintings by the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, for example, were perfected with this new style.
In the 16th century, oils flourished as the fundamental painting material in Venice. At the beginning of the 17th century, Venetian painters were proficient in the use of the essential traits of oil painting, particularly in employing multiple layers of glazing. Canvas, after a long period of growth, topped wood panels as the most popular support.
One of the 17th-century masters of the oil technique was Velázquez, a Spanish artist in the Venetian tradition, whose highly economical but sure brushstrokes have commonly been adopted, particularly in portraiture. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens influenced later painters in the method in which he loaded the light colours opaquely, juxtaposing the thin, transparent darks and shadows. The third notable 17th-century master of oil painting was the Dutch painter Rembrandt. In his paintings, a single brushstroke could effectively depict form; cumulative strokes gave great textural depth, combining the rough and the smooth, the thick and the thin. A field of loaded whites and transparent darks would be fully enhanced by glazed effects, blendings, and highly controlled impastos.
Other notable influences on the later easel painting techniques are the smooth, thinly painted, deliberately planned, tight styles. A great many admired works (e.g., those of Johannes Vermeer) were executed with smooth and graduated blends of colours to cast subtly shadowed forms and delicate colour variations.
The technical requirements of some schools of modern painting cannot be achieved by use of traditional genres and/or techniques, however. Many abstract painters - including some modern painters who use these traditional styles - have demonstrated a desire for a wholly different plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be formed in oil paint and its conventional additives. Some desire a wider range of thick to thin applications and a more expedient rate of drying. Some have mixed coarsely grained substances with the colours to create new textures, some of them use oil paints in much greater thicknesses than is usual, and many have turned to using acrylic paints, because they are more versatile and dry quickly.
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Sculpture is an art in which hard or plastic materials are molded into three-D art objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that can vary from tableaux to contexts surrounding the spectator. A huge variety of materials may be used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials can be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or simply shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed term that can be applied to a permanently circumscribed category of objects or set of activities. It is, rather, the name given to art that is growing and is changing and continually extends the range of its activities and evolving new types of objects. The breadth of the term became much wider in the later part of the 20th century than what it had been only two or three decades before, and in the fluid 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 some features which in previous centuries were considered essential to the sculpturing art but are no longer present in a majority of modern sculpture and so no longer form part of the definition. One of the most important of these is representation. Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as a representational art; an imitation of forms in life, mostly human figures but also inanimate objects, such as game, utensils, and books. Since the dawn of the 20th century, however, sculpture also began to include nonrepresentational forms. It became accepted that the forms of such functional three-dimensional objects as furniture, pots, and buildings may be expressive and beautiful without having to be in any way representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3-D art began to be an art form in and of themselves.
Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was regarded as essentially an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows inside and between its solid areas — have always been to some degree an inextricable part of its design, but this role was secondary. In a large field of modern sculpture, however, the attention has deepened, and the spatial roles have become dominant. Spatial sculpture is today a wholly recognised branch of the art form.
It was also taken for granted in sculpture in the past that its components were of a constant shape and size and, except for objects such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Diana (a monumental weather vane), should not move. With the contemporary developments of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its form can still be viewed as fundamental to defining the art of sculpture.
Last, sculpture during the 20th century was no longer restricted to the two traditional forming procedures of carving and modeling, or to any traditional natural materials like stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. As today’s sculptors may use any materials and methods of manufacture that they want, the art can no longer be identified for the use of any special kind of materials or techniques.
During all this evolution, there is probably still one area that stayed constant in the art form, and it exists as the central abiding concern of sculptors: the art form is a field of the visual arts that is particularly concerned with the creation of works in 3D.
Sculpture might be either in the round or in relief. A sculpture in the round is a separate, detached object in its own right, leading a similar independent existence in space as a human body or a chair. A sculpture that is in relief does not have this independance. It is part of and projects from or is an innate part of an object that might serve either as a background to it or a matrix from which it emerges.
The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round puts limitations on its scope in some respects when compared with the scope of painting. Sculpture cannot have the illusion of space from solely optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as we might see in a painting. It does have a kind of reality, a vivid physical presence that simply cannot be found in the pictorial arts. Different forms of sculpture are tangible as well as visible, and may appeal strongly and directly to both tactile and visual sense. Even the visually impaired, including those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate some forms of sculpture. It was, in fact, stated by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be considered as elementarily an art of touch and that the origins of sculptural forms can be tracked to the pleasure that we experience in touch.
All three-dimensional forms are regarded as possessing an expressive character along with their purely geometric properties. They can strike the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so forth. By exploiting the expressive qualities of form, the artist is able to create images in which subject matter and expressiveness mutually reinforce the form. This imagery may go beyond the pure presentation of fact and evoke a near endless range of subtle and powerful reactions.
The aesthetic raw material for this art is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive 3-D form. A sculpture can draw upon what already exists in the endless variety of natural and man-made form, or it may be an art of pure invention. It has been used to express a vast range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.
All human beings, inherently involved from birth with the world of three-D form, know something of its structural and expressive elements and develop emotional reactions to them. This combination of intellect and sensitivity, also known as a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to that sense of form that this art form primarily appeals.
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