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Water colour is colour pigment ground in gum, usually gum arabic, and applied with brush and water to a painting surface, usually paper; the term also denotes an artwork executed in this medium. The pigment is normally transparent but can be turned opaque by mixing with a whiting and in this form is known as body colour, or gouache. It can also be blended with casein, a phosphoprotein of milk.
Watercolour compares in range and quality 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 paint 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 opposite. In essence, instead of building up he leaves out. The paper itself creates the whites. The darkest accents may be applied on the paper with the pigment as it comes out of the tube or with a small amount of water mixed with it. Otherwise the colours are thinned with water. The greater amount of 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 thinned 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 sketch. Entire compositions can be created in this way. This technique may also be brushed over duller washes to enliven them.
Three hundred years before the golden age of late 18th-century English watercolourists, Albrecht Dürer had predicted 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 preparatory sketches for oil paintings.
The main exponents 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 unique effects of light and texture. Victorian painters, such as Birket Foster, used a laborious method of colour washing a monochrome underpainting, similar to the tempera-oil technique. Following the direct, vigorous watercolours of the French Impressionists and Postimpressionists, however, the medium was 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 pigment is applied, colour intensity and tonal depth being built up by successive, transparent washes on wet paper. Patches of white paper are left unpainted to represent white objects and to create effects of reflected light. These flecks of bare paper create the sparkle characteristic of pure watercolour. Tonal gradations and soft, atmospheric qualities are formed by staining the paper when it is very wet with varying 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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Artists’ oil colours are made by adding dry powder pigments with particular refined linseed oil until the substance reaches a stiff paste consistency and grinding it under strong friction in steel roller mills. The perfection of the colour is essential. The usual standard is a smooth, buttery paste, rather than stringy or long or tacky. When a transient or mobile quality is desired by the artist, a liquid painting medium such as pure gum turpentine needs to be added with the concoction. To expediate drying, a siccative, or liquid drier, is occasionally used.
Top-class brushes are available in two styles: red sable (hair from numerous members of the weasel species) and chemically whitened hog bristles. Both can be acquired in numbered sizes for four regular shapes: round (pointed), flat, bright (flat shape but is shorter and not so supple), and oval (flat shape but bluntly pointed). Red sable brushes are usually chosen for the smoother, detailed type of technique. The painting knife, a declicately tempered, skinny version of the art palette knife, is a useful tool for painting oil colours in a robust style.
The generic support for an oil painting is a canvas of pure European linen of sturdy close weave. A canvas is cut to the required size and pulled over a frame, mostly wood, to which it is secured with tacks or, in the 20th century, with staples. If the artist wants to lessen the absorbency of the fabric itself and achieve a glossy surface, a primer or ground could be applied and is given time to dry prior to painting. The most often found primers for this have been gesso, rabbit-skin glue, and lead white. If stiffness and consistency are preferred to elasticity and texture, a wooden or processed paperboard panel, sized or primed, must be utilised. A number of other supports, such as paper and various textiles and metals, also have been used.
A polish of paint varnish is commonly given to a finished oil painting to protect it from atmospheric attacks, minor abrasions, and an injurious accumulation of dirt. This film of varnish paint might be taken off without damaging the painting by experts using isopropyl alcohol and such ordinary solvents. The picture varnish also sets the surface to a uniform lustre and sets the depth of tone and colour intensity essentially to the look initially seen by the artist in the paint. Some painters today, especially those who don’t favour deep, intense colouring, will stay with a mat, or lustreless, finish in oil paintings.
The majority of oil paintings dating before the 19th century were built up in layers. The first would be a blank, uniform field of thin paint known as a ground. The ground subdued the white gleam of the primer and allowed a gentle colour on which to apply the paint. The shapes and items in the painting would be roughly blocked in by using shades of white, as well as gray or neutral green, red, or brown. The resulting mass of monochromatic light and dark shades were known as the underpainting. Forms could then be given definition with either solid paint or scumbles; irregular, thinly applied layers of opaque pigment that displaying a variety of effects. In the completion stage, transparent layers of pure colour known as glazes would be employed to cast luminosity, depth, and brilliance to the objects, and highlights could be created with thick, textured patches of paint called impastos.
Oil as a painting medium is recorded back to the 11th century. The practice of easel painting with oil colours, however, came directly from 15th-century tempera-painting methods. Essential improvements in the refining of linseed oil and the availability of volatile solvents post 1400 coincided with a requirement for mediums other than pure egg-yolk tempera, in meeting the contemporary requirements of the Renaissance (see tempera painting). Initially, oil paints and varnishes were utilised to glaze tempera panels that were painted with the common linear draftsmanship. The technically brilliant, jewel-like portraits by the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck, for example, were finished with this technique.
In the 16th century, oil colour became firmly established as the fundamental painting material in Venice. From then, Venetian painters were proficient in utilising the essential characteristics of oil painting, notably in their employment of successive layers of glazing. Canvas of linen, after a long era of development, overcame wooden panels as the common support.
One 17th-century master of the oil technique was Velázquez, a Spanish artist in the Venetian tradition, whose supremely economical but informative brushstrokes have often been repeated, especially in portraiture. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens influenced later painters in the style in which he loaded light colours opaquely, juxtaposing his thin, transparent darks and shadows. The third remarkable 17th-century master of oil painting was the Dutch painter Rembrandt. In his work, a single brushstroke can effectively depict form; cumulative strokes gave 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 then enhanced by glazed effects, blendings, and highly controlled impastos.
Other notable influences on the later techniques of easel painting are the smooth, thinly painted, deliberately planned, tight styles of painting. A great many admired works (e.g., like those from Johannes Vermeer) were formed with smooth graduated blends of colours to create subtle forms and delicate colour variations.
The technical requirements of some schools of modern painting cannot be realized by use of traditional genres or techniques, however, and many abstract painters - as well as a few modern painters in traditional styles - have shown a desire for a wholly different plastic flow or viscosity that cannot be had in oil paint and its conventional additives. Some need a greater range of thick and thin applications and a more expedient rate of drying. Some mix coarsely grained materials with the colours to create new textures, some artists applied oil paints in heavier thicknesses than is usual, and a large part have begun to use acrylic paints, which are more versatile and dry fast.
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Sculpture is an artistic form in which hard or plastic materials are molded into 3D objects. The designs may be embodied in freestanding objects, in reliefs on surfaces, or in environments that vary from tableaux to contexts enveloping the spectator. A massive variety of material are used, including clay, wax, stone, metal, fabric, glass, wood, plaster, rubber, and random “found” objects. Materials will be carved, modeled, molded, cast, wrought, welded, sewn, assembled, or otherwise shaped and combined.
Sculpture is not a fixed name that is applicable to a permanently standing category of objects or sets of activities. It is, rather, an art that is growing and is changing and is continually extending the range of its activities and evolving new designs of objects. The breadth of the term was much wider in the later part of the 20th century than it had been only two or three decades previously, and in the evolving state of visual art at the dawn of the 21st century, no one can predict what its future extensions are likely to see.
There are some features which in previous centuries were considered essential to the sculpturing art but are no longer present in a large part of modern sculpture and thus no longer form part of a definition. One of the most elementary points of these is representation. Previous to the 20th century, sculpture was considered a representational art; an imitation of forms in life, that were mostly human figures but also inanimate objects, including game, utensils, and books. At the start of the 20th century, however, sculpture has also included nonrepresentational forms. It began to be accepted that forms of such functional 3-D objects as furniture, pots, and buildings can be expressive and beautiful without being in any way representational. It was only in the 20th century that nonfunctional, nonrepresentational, 3-D works of art began to be created.
Prior to the 20th century, sculpture was seen as essentially an art of solid form, or mass. Whilte the negative elements of sculpture — the voids and hollows within and between its solid parts — have usually been to some kind of extent an intricate part of its design, but their role was secondary. In a large area of modern sculpture, however, the focus of attention has shifted, and the spatial elements have started to be dominant. Spatial sculpture is today a wholly recognised branch of the art form.
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), did not move. With contemporary development of kinetic sculpture, neither the immobility nor immutability of its design can still be considered to be fundamental to the definition of sculpture.
Finally, sculpture since the 20th century was not restricted to the two traditional forming processes of carving and modeling, or to such traditional natural materials as stone, metal, wood, ivory, bone, and clay. As contemporary sculptors might use any materials and methods of manufacture that serve their purpose, the definition of sculpture can no longer be identified by any special materials or techniques.
With all this evolution, there is probably just one thing that stayed constant in the art of sculpture, and it exists as the key abiding concern of sculptors: the art is a part of the visual arts that is especially concerned with the creation of form in three-D.
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 an independent existence in space as a human body or a chair. A relief does not have this reality. It is attached to and projects from or is an innate part of something else that might serve either as a background for it or a matrix from whence it projects.
The actual 3D nature of sculpture in the round restricts its scope in a few respects in comparison with the scope of painting. Sculpture does not have the illusion of space from simple optical means, or invest its shape with atmosphere and light as we might see in a painting. However, sculpture 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 they may appeal strongly and directly to the tactile and visual sensibilities. Even the visually impaired, even those who are congenitally blind, can construct and appreciate some sorts of sculpture. It was, in fact, said by the 20th-century art critic Sir Herbert Read that sculpture should be regarded as firstly an art of touch and that the roots of sculptural forms can be tracked to the pleasure we experience in doing so.
All 3D forms are regarded as possessing an expressive character along with their solely geometric properties. They are viewed the observer as delicate, aggressive, flowing, taut, relaxed, dynamic, soft, and so on and so forth. By exploiting the evocative qualities of form, a sculptor is able to create visual imagery in which subject matter and expressiveness are mutually reinforcing of form. Visual imagery will go beyond the simple presentation of fact and imply a vast range of subtle and powerful feelings.
The aesthetic raw material used in the art of sculpture is, so to speak, the total realm of expressive three-D form. A sculpture might draw upon what we know exists in the endless worlds of natural and man-made form, or it may be an art of pure invention. It has been utilised to express a deep range of human emotions and feelings from the most tender and delicate to the highly violent and ecstatic.
All human beings, innately involved from birth with the world of 3D form, understand something of its structural and expressive properties and will possess emotional reactions to them. This combination of understanding and response, called a sense of form, can be cultivated and refined. It is to this sense of form that sculpture primarily appeals.
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