TWO-DIMENSIONAL MEDIA DRAWING - PAINTING Arch. Rania Obead
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Everybody draws, we routinely give children drawing materials so that they can entertain and express themselves, and they take to it so naturally that there can scarcely be a person above the age of two who has never made a drawing. And who even needs special materials? A pebble scraped across a flat stone will draw a line. A stick dragged through the snow. The shaft of a feather in the smooth, wet sand. Our finger on a fogged-up windowpane.
Working in a beautifully controlled range of values, Shahzia Sikaner created an image of layered images. The deepest layer, we can make out an architectural setting. Before it, a figure male, it seems. A woman sits on the floor nearby a curled-up cat. In the next layer, a woman s head. the topmost layer of imagery takes precedence: a system of tangled lines.
Drawing seems intimate because it is frequently the artist s private note taking. Picasso, mindful of his own legacy, began early on to date and save all his sketches. Much changed between this first rapidly sketched idea and the final painting, but one essential gesture is already in place. Pablo Picasso. First composition study for Guernica.
Drawings are often made in great quantities; some artists do dozens of preparatory drawings for every finished work. In drawings such as Dancer Adjusting Her Slipper we have the impression of being present at an intimate transaction between artist and model. We can easily imagine Degas adjusting the position of the arm, modifying the contour of the foot, his eyes shifting back and forth between his evolving drawing and the model standing a few feet away.
Artists may draw for no other reason than to understand the world around them, to investigate its forms. There is no better exercise in seeing than to take a small part of the natural world and try to draw it in all its detail. Leonardo had the curiosity and the powers of observation of a natural scientist. The drawing here reflects his interest in parallels between the behavior of currents of water and the motions of waving grasses.
The drawings we have been looking at are all on paper, a material we associate closely with drawing. Historically, however, many other surfaces have been used to draw on. Among the oldest representational images that we know of are the cave drawings in southern France and in Spain. Although these images are often referred to as paintings, many have a strong linear quality that would more accurately categorize them as drawings. The artists worked directly on the cave walls, possibly using mats of hair or charred sticks to draw the contours of the many animals they portrayed.
With the development of pottery during the Neolithic era, fired clay became a surface for drawing in many cultures. The durability of fired clay has meant that many examples have survived when works in more perishable materials have not. For example, we know of ancient Greek Painting only from literary sources, for not a single example has come down to us. Thanks to the Greek custom of drawing on pottery, however, we have some understanding of what those paintings might have looked like.
MATERIALS FOR DRAWING Drawing media can be divided into two broad groups: Dry Media and Liquid Media. Dry media are generally applied directly in stick form. As the stick is dragged over a suitably abrasive surface, it leaves particles of itself behind. Liquid media are generally applied with a tool such as a pen or a brush. Although some media are naturally occurring, most of today s media are manufactured, usually by combining powdered pigment (coloring material) with a binder, a substance that allows it to be shaped into sticks (for dry media), to be suspended in fluid(for liquid media), and to adhere to the drawing surface.
DRY MEDIA 1/ GRAPHITE a soft, crystalline form of carbon first discovered in the 16th century, graphite is a naturally occurring drawing medium. Pure, solid graphite need only be mined, then shaped into a convenient form. Dragged across an abrasive surface, it leaves a trail of dark gray particles that have a slight sheen.
Graphite was adopted as a drawing medium soon after its discovery. But pure, solid graphite is rare and precious. Toward the end of the 18th century, a technique was discovered for binding powdered graphite with fine clay to make a cylindrical drawing stick. Encased in wood, it became what we know as a pencil, today the most common drawing medium of all.
Chris Ofili. Prince among Thieves with Flowers. 1999. The softer the pencil, the darker and richer the line it produces. The harder the pencil, the more pale and silvery the line. In his drawing Prince among Thieves with Flowers.
2/ METALPOINT Metalpoint, the ancestor of the graphite pencil, is an old technique that was especially popular during the Renaissance. Few artists use it now, because it is not very forgiving of mistakes or indecision. Filippino Lippi drew two figure studies in metalpoint on a pale pink ground.
3/CHARCOAL Charcoal is charred wood. Techniques for manufacturing it have been known since ancient times. The best-quality artist s charcoal is made from special vine or willow twigs, slowly heated in an airtight chamber until only sticks of carbon remain black, brittle, and featherweight. illustrates well the tonal range of charcoal, deepening from sketchy, pale gray to thick, velvety black. Yvonne Jacquette. Three Mile Island, Night I
4/ CRAYON, PASTEL, AND CHALK The dry media we have discussed so far graphite, metalpoint, and charcoal allow artists to work with a range of values on the gray scale. With crayon, pastel, and chalk, a full range of colors becomes available.
Degas The Singer in Green puts us right on stage next to the performer, who touches her shoulder in a gesture that Degas borrowed from one of his favorite café singers. Degas created his drawing in pastel. Pastel consists of pigment bound with a no greasy binder such as a solution of gum arabic or gum tragacanth.
To geologists, chalk names a kind of soft, white limestone. In art, the word has been used less precisely to name three soft, finely textured stones that can be used for drawing: black chalk (a composite of carbon and clay), red chalk (iron oxide and clay), and white chalk (calcite or calcium carbonate). Like graphite, these stones need only be mined and then cut into convenient sizes for use. LEONARDO
LIQUID MEDIA PEN AND INK Drawing inks generally consist of ultrafine particles of pigment suspended in water. A binder such as gum arabic is added to hold the Particles in suspension and help them adhere to the drawing surface. Inks today are available in a range of colors. Historically, however, black and brown inks have predominated, manufactured from a great variety of ingenious recipes since at least the 4th century B.C.E. There are endless ways to get ink onto paper. If you want a controlled, sustained, flexible line, you ll reach for a brush or a pen.
One of the greatest draftsmen who ever lived, Rembrandt made thousands of drawings over the course of his lifetime. Rembrandt. Cottage among Trees.
BRUSH AND INK The soft and supple brushes used for watercolor can also be used with ink. Brushes can be wielded boldly and brutally or with great delicacy and refinement, producing a broad range of effects.
TWO-DIMENSIONAL MEDIA Painting
Paint is made of pigment, powdered color, compounded with a medium or vehicle, a liquid that holds the particles of pigment together without dissolving them. The vehicle generally acts as or includes a binder, an ingredient that ensures that the paint, even when diluted and spread thinly, will adhere to the surface. Without a binder, pigments would simply powder off as the paint dried. Paints are applied to a support, which is the canvas, paper, wood panel, wall, or other surface on which the artist works. The support may be prepared to receive paint with a ground or primer, a preliminary coating.
ENCAUSTIC Encaustic paints consist of pigment mixed with wax and resin. When the colors are heated, the wax melts and the paint can be brushed easily. When the wax cools, the paint hardens. After the painting is completed, there may Be afinal burning in as a heat source is passed close to the surface of the painting to fuse the colors. Literary sources tell us that encaustic was an important technique in ancient Greece. (The word encaustic comes from the Greek for burning in.
The earliest encaustic paintings to have survived, however, are funeral Portraits created during the first centuries of our era in Egypt, which was then under Roman rule. Portraits such as this were set into the casings of mummified bodies to identify and memorialize the dead. The colors of this painting, almost as fresh as the day they were set down, testify to the permanence of encaustic.
The technique of encaustic was forgotten within a few centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, but it was redeveloped during the 19th century, partly in response to the discovery of the Roman-Egyptian portraits. One of the foremost contemporary artists to experiment with encaustic is Jasper Johns Numbers in color is painted in encaustic over a collage of paper on canvas. Encaustic allowed Johns to build up a richly textured paint surface. (Think of candle drippings and you will get the idea.) Moreover, wax will not harm The paper over time as oil paint would.
FRESCO With fresco, pigments are mixed with water and applied to a plaster support, usually a wall or a ceiling coated in plaster. The plaster may be dry, in which case the technique is known as fresco secco, Italian for dry fresco. But most often when speaking about fresco, we mean buon fresco, true fresco, in which paint made simply of pigment and water is applied to wet Lime plaster.
As the plaster dries, the lime undergoes a chemical transformation, and act as a binder, fusing the pigment with the plaster surface. There is nothing tentative about fresco every touch of the brush in fresco is a commitment. The only way an artist can correct mistakes or change the forms is to let the plaster dry, chip it away, and start all over again
This paint called the School of Athens and depicts the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, centered in the composition and framed by the arch, along with their followers and students. The school in question means the two schools of philosophy represented by the two classical thinkers Plato s the more abstract and metaphysical, Aristotle s the more earthly and physical.
The most celebrated frescoes of the 20th century were created in Mexico. where the revolutionary government that came into power in 1921 after a decade of civil war commissioned artists to create murals about Mexico itself the glories of its ancient civilizations, its political struggles, its people, and its hopes for the future. Mixtec Culture painted by Diego Rivera in the National Palace in Mexico City.
TEMPERA Tempera shares qualities with both watercolor and oil paint. technically, tempera is paint in which the vehicle is An emulsion, which is a stable mixture of an aqueous liquid with an oil, fat, wax, or resin. Tempera dries very quickly, and so colors cannot be blended easily once they are set down. Traditionally, tempera was used on a wood panel.
A lovely example of tempera painting as it was practiced during the early Renaissance is Saint Anthony Abbot tempted by a Heap of Gold. One of eight panels illustrating episodes from the life of Saint Anthony. It was painted by a 15thcentury.
Today, tempera is available commercially in tubes, though many painters still prefer to make their own. One modern painter who experimented with both commercial and handmade tempera was Jacob Lawrence. Lawrence used tempera to make a series of images that tell a story, in This case the story of the Great Migration the migration of thousands of African Americans from the South to the North beginning about 1910.
OIL Oil paints consist of pigment compounded with oil, usually linseed oil. The oil acts as a binder, creating as it dries a transparent film in which the pigment is suspended. A popular legend claims that oil painting was invented early in the 15th century by the great Netherlandish artist Jan van Eyck, who experimented with it for this portrait.
When oil paints were first introduced, most artists, including Jan van Eyck, continued working on wood panels. Gradually, however, artists Adopted the more flexible canvas, which offered two great advantages. For one thing, the changing styles favored larger and larger paintings. Whereas wood Panels were heavy and liable to crack, the lighter linen canvas could be stretched to almost unlimited size. Second, as artists came to serve distant patrons, their canvases could be rolled up for easy and safe shipment.
A painting such as Gerhard Richter s January would not be possible without oil paint s capacity for impasto. We might even say that the subject matter of January is oil paint itself as a sensuous medium. Richter laid the paint on thickly in layers and smeared or smudged them while they were still wet.
WATERCOLOR, GOUACHE, AND SIMILAR MEDIA Watercolor consists of pigment in a vehicle of water and gum arabic, a Sticky plant substance that acts as the binder. As with drawing, the most common support for watercolor is paper. Also like drawing, watercolor is commonly thought of as an intimate art, small in scale and free in execution. The leading characteristic of watercolors is their transparency. They are not applied thickly, like oil paints,.
John Singer Sargent s Mountain Stream is a perfect example of what we might think of as classic watercolor technique. Controlled and yet spontaneous in feeling, it gives the Impression of having been dashed off in a single sitting. The white of the paper serves for the foam of the rushing stream, and even the shadows on the opposite shore retain a translucent quality.
Gouache is watercolor with inert white pigment added. Inert pigment is pigment that becomes colorless or virtually colorless in paint. In gouache, it serves to make the colors opaque, which means that when used at full strength, they can completely hide any ground or other color they are painted over. The Jungle Human and animal forms mingle in this fascinating work, which contains references to Santería, a Caribbean religion that combines West African and Roman Catholic beliefs.
ACRYLIC These new synthetic artists colors are broadly known as acrylics, although a more exact name for them is polymer paints. The vehicle consists of acrylic resin, Polymerized through emulsion in water. As acrylic paint dries, the resin particles coalesce to form a tough, flexible, and waterproof film.
Stephen Mueller s Riparian Reveal illustrates something of the range of acrylic paint. The broadly brushed washes of translucent color in the background mimic the effects of watercolor.
COLLAGE Collage is a French word that means pasting or gluing. In art, it refers to the practice of attaching actual objects such as paper or cloth to the surface of a canvas or some other support, as well as to the resultant artwork. It was Pablo Picasso, in the spring of 1912, who first used the technique, Pasting a piece of patterned oilcloth onto a painting of a still life. But the idea lay fallow until the fall, when Georges Braque began Including shapes cut from wallpaper and newsprint in his drawings. Picasso saw what his friend was up to, took the idea, and ran with it.
Guitar and Wine Glass is one of Picasso s earliest collages. In the lower left corner he has pasted a bit of the daily newspaper As printed, the headline referred to the current Balkan wars, but what did Picasso mean? Did he go to battle to enrich the possibilities of Art by the then-shocking practice of gluing objects to canvas? Or was his Battle that of upstaging his ambitious colleague? Probably some of both.
Pieced together from bits of photographic magazine illustrations, Mysteries is one of a series of works that evoke the texture of everyday life as Bearden. Had known it growing up as an African American in rural North Carolina. In Bearden s hands, the technique of collage alludes both to the African-American folk tradition of quilting, which also pieces together a whole From many fragments, and to the rhythms and improvisatory nature of jazz, another art form with African roots.
RECENT DIRECTIONS: REACHING FOR THE WALL However, this conception is due in part to another reason you might not think of: the size of paper. For centuries, artist-quality paper was made in single sheets in standard sizes. Today, however, quality paper is available in larger and larger sizes, including rolls 10 feet wide taller than an average wall. Paul Noble uses wall-size paper to make wall-size drawings. At just over 8 feet in height but only about 5 feet in width, Nobspital is far from his largest effort.
One of the first contemporary artists to create wall drawings was Sol LeWitt. LeWitt did not execute his drawings himself. Rather, he Created the instructions for making the drawing and entrusted their execution to others. The subject of the drawing is the set of instructions for its Creation, and LeWitt insisted that they be posted nearby. For example, the instructions for Wall Drawing #766 are: 21 isometric cubes of varying sizes, each with color ink washes superimposed.
Gary Simmons takes his inspiration from a drawing medium that accompanies most of us all through childhood and adolescence: chalk on blackboard. Simmons has created numerous drawings on actual blackboards. In gallery and museum settings, he often coats walls with slate paint to create blackboard-like mural surfaces, as here in boom.