- Industry: Art history
- Number of terms: 11718
- Number of blossaries: 0
- Company Profile:
A plane surface is a flat surface, and any discrete flat surface within a painting or sculpture can be referred to as a plane. The flat patches seen in Cubist paintings are often referred to as planes, and geometric abstract artists refer frequently to planes in discussing their work.
Industry:Art history
A smooth, flat surface on which artists set out and mix their colours before painting, which is often designed to be held in the hand. The term also refers to the range of colours habitually used by and characteristic of an artist. A palette in computer graphics is a chosen set of colours that are each assigned a number, and it is this number that determines the colour of the pixel.
Industry:Art history
Rigid support for painting on, traditionally made of joined planks of wood, but more recently boards and composites.
Industry:Art history
Matted plant fibres made into sheet form either by hand (traditional) or machine (modern). Handmade paper was produced by drying pulp, produced from beating cotton or linen rags in water, on wire trays. The lines of thinner paper produced by these wires are visible in 'laid' paper. 'Wove' paper, developed in the mid eighteenth century, is made from trays with a tightly-woven wire mesh which leave a smoother surface and no visible lines. Artists use both handmade and machine made paper, although handmade is often used for printmaking. Paper is traditionally said to have been invented in China in the second century AD, but was not made in Europe until the twelfth century.
Industry:Art history
Powdered pigments mixed with a small amount of binding medium to produce dry coloured sticks. Chalk can be added to soften intense pigments and to obtain a range of hues.
Industry:Art history
Usually refers to a distinct green or brown surface layer on bronze sculpture. Patina can be created naturally by the oxidising effect of the atmosphere or weather, or artificially by the application of chemicals. Almost all bronze sculpture has been patinated one way or the other but Constantin Brancusi polished his bronzes to reveal the beautiful natural gold colour of the metal.
Industry:Art history
Historically, drawings have been made by applying ink with a quill pen made by cutting the hollow stem of a large feather, from a bird such as a goose or a swan, to create a nib. Hollow reeds were also cut in the same way and used for writing and drawing. Metal pens succeeded the quill during the nineteenth century. Pen and ink is often used in conjunction with other techniques such as washes. (See also Ink. )
Industry:Art history
Art in which the medium is the artist's own body and the artwork takes the form of actions performed by the artist. Performance art has origins in Futurism and Dada, but became a major phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s and can be seen as a branch of Conceptual art. In Germany and Austria it was known as Actionism. An important influence on the emergence of Performance was the photographs of the Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock making his so-called action paintings, taken in 1950 by the photographer Hans Namuth. Performance art had its immediate origins in the more overtly theatrical Happenings organised by Allan Kaprow and others in New York in the late 1950s. By the mid 1960s this theatrical element was being stripped out by early Performance artists such as Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman. In Europe the German artist Joseph Beuys was a hugely influential pioneer of Performance art, making a wide impact with his 'actions' from 1963 on. These were powerful expressions of the pain of human existence, and complex allegories of social and political issues and man's relationship to nature. In Britain the artist duo Gilbert & George made highly original Performance works from 1969. A major problem for early Performance artists was the ephemeral nature of the medium. Right from the start performance pieces were recorded in photography, film and video, and these eventually became the primary means by which Performance reached a wide public.
Industry:Art history
A dispersion of pigments in a drying oil that forms a tough, coloured film on exposure to air. The drying oil is a vegetable oil, often made by crushing nuts or seeds. For paints, linseed oil is most commonly used, but poppy, sunflower, safflower, soya bean and walnut oils have also been used. Drying oils initially cure through oxidation leading to cross linking of the molecular chains; this is a slow process affected by film thickness and paint components. Artists have used turpentine or mineral spirits to dilute oil paint. A heavily diluted layer dries relatively quickly, being tack-free in a few days. Thicker layers, containing more oil, take longer. Oil paint continues to dry, getting harder with age over many decades. Pigments and extenders will also affect the rate of drying, so different colours may dry at different speeds.
Industry:Art history
What we call art in all its forms—painting, sculpture, drawing and engraving—appeared in human groups all over the world in the period known as the Upper Paleolithic, which is roughly from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. In Europe, sophisticated and powerful paintings from this period have been discovered in caves such as Lascaux in France. In 1994 possibly even more astonishing works were found in the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche Valley, also in France. Cave paintings consist of pigments such as coloured earths rubbed onto the rock. In some cases they appear to have been mixed into a paste first. The paintings mostly represent animals but there are some human images. Since then painting has changed in essence very little. Supports evolved from rock faces, through the walls of buildings, to portable ones of paper, wood, and finally cloth, particularly canvas. The range of pigments expanded through a wide range of earths and minerals, to plant extracts and modern synthetic colours. Pigments have been mixed with water and gum to make a paint, but in the fifteenth century in Europe the innovation of using oil (linseed) produced a newly flexible and durable medium that played a major part in the explosion of creativity in Western painting at the Renaissance and after. At the same time subject matter expanded to embrace almost every aspect of life (Genres).
Industry:Art history
