Sunday, July 05, 2009

5th July 2009 - Who's made a mark this week? #103


(left) Silver Morning (Watercolour 40cm x 50cm or 16 inches x 20 inches)
(right) Homeward Bound (Watercolour. 40cm x 40cm or 16 inches x 16 inches)
copyright Sarah Wimperis

At this time of year there seem to be a lot of competitions - bringing both deadlines and announcements as to who has and hasn't got in. I'm getting emails from people and seeing quite a few blog posts about 'what happened next'

For me the stand out response to date has been by Sarah Wimperis (The Red Shoes) who posted Salty old Sea Dogs on a Saturday Night on our Watermarks blog after she didn't get into a competition. She then followed up on her wonderful watercolours in that post by doing a couple of more posts on her own blog in the week which both had stunning paintings - see Silver Morning and Homeward Bound

Mangetout
oil on cannvas, 25cm x 44cm
copyright Ilaria Rosselli del Turco

Ilaria Roselli Del Turco (Ilaria Rosselli Del Turco - News ) had some better news from the Artists and Illustrated Magazine when she heard that her painting "Mangetout" was the a runner up in their Artist of the Year competition, for the still-life category (see Artists and Illustrators Art Competition)

Art Blogs

Compendium

  • I commend June roundup by Anna at See.Be.Draw. to you. It's a thoughtful review of posts she's enjoyed in June
Drawing and sketching

Expanding visual horizons this week - I'm focusing entirely on people who sketch who don't live in North America or the UK!
Coloured pencils and pastels
  • Lauren Milroy is a design engineer with a Masters in Product Design from Stanford University. She had one or two interesting ideas about how you can use up all those little stumpy coloured pencils.........you need new flip flops? Or new heels?


shoes and flip flops made out coloured pencils by Lauren Milroy

Painters
Portraiture

Artists - David Hockney

Art Business and Marketing

Whilst stories of online gallery sales exist, they're sadly all-too-rare, considering the gazillion online galleries currently choking the web......Online galleries are established and marketed at artists. The gallery promotes itself to attract more artists. The more works displayed on a site, the more it's measured as successful.
But all that marketing and promotion towards getting more artist members doesn't address the issue of buyers!

Art and the economy / Art Collectors

Artists Communities and Art Forums

Art Education / workshops / Tips and techniques

Art Education

Just a reminder about the Life Class is being screened on Channel 4 12.30pm every day this next week. Here are the links to Tips and techniques

How to get from this (left) to this (right)
Here's how to stretch watercolour paper (that bit which always seems to get left out of books!)
Workshops

Art Exhibitions

Joe - Boy 2
copyright Peter Monkman
  • Peter Monkman, winner of the BP portrait prize this year, wrote to tell me that he more Changeling portraits and some new work in an exhibition Uncanny Likeness about New Perspectives on Contemporary Portraiture (11th July to 22nd August 2009) under the auspices of Ovada (the The Oxfordshire Visual Arts Development Agency). Peter will be exhibiting Joe - Boy2 and Changeling 1 and Changeling 4.
  • St Louis, Missouri: A new sculpture park in St. Louis, filled with works by Fernand Léger, Tony Smith, Jim Dine and Bernar Venet, has been created to draw tourists and art fans to the city - as described in this New York Times article Sculpture to Invigorate a Shrinking City. You can also see it here in this slideshow A Look Inside Citygarden
  • This New York Times article is interesting Where Art Meets Social Networking Sites. It focuses on the artist who come to digital technology of later and how it generated “Status Update” which comrpises nearly 50 works by more than a dozen artists. See it at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven
“Is it art to do art on an iPhone and put it on an easel?” he asked. “If you go back to Duchamp and put a toilet on the wall — is it art? Yes, it is.”

Art Museums and Galleries

De-accessinioning is what happens when art galleries and museums sell of parts of their collection.

Book reviews

Opinion Polls

Websites, webware and blogging

  • When you want to show the computer who's boss! is about what happened to me on Monday and how I lost a very long posted which I'd drafted using Google Docs. Thanks to:
    • all the people who commented on strategies for dealing with computer angst
    • Zsu who told me about a feature of Google Docs which meant I hadn't lost all my draft post - and it was duly retrieved
if you use Google Docs, it has revision history, which lets you go back to any previously saved point! So you should be able to undo the cut even after it saves the modification. You can get to it from the Tools menu.

and finally........

Tomorrow the 4th plinth in Trafalgar Square starts to be occupied by a series of people for an hour at a time. Read all about it:
Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break, a different person will make the Plinth their own. If you're selected, you can use your time on the plinth as you like. One & Other is open to anyone and everyone from any corner of the UK. As long as you're 16 or over and are living or staying in the UK, you can apply to be part of this unforgettable artistic experiment.
So far 15,374 people have applied for the 2,400 places. You can read the blog about the project here.

I can see sketching opportunities. Maybe we should have a special Trafalgar square sketchcrawl?

Making a Mark reviews......
Posted by Making A Mark on Sunday, July 05, 2009 5 comments
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Saturday, July 04, 2009

Correcting colour: How to stop your white paper looking grey

I very often see people posting images of work on white paper where some of the white paper is showing - but it looks grey. Very often the colours in the image are also very muted. "It looks much better in real life" is the comment that often goes alongside. I know I've written this - have you?

If you have and you want to know what to do to make your image appear more accurate in terms of colour read on!

Correcting Colour - Learn to Love Levels!

I used to have the same problem until I discovered the Levels function in Photoshop Elements - and how tweaking the RGB colour profile levels of your image can really help you achieve a much more accurate result.

Typically people need to adjust from images which look grey to white.

In this demonstration I'm going to show you how I adjusted a photo of a pen and ink sketch - taken in shade with the Moleskine Sketchbook on the ground of the garden - from blue to light cream. It's a very effective way of showing you how much you can change an image to render it more accurately.

Colour is RGB

You may remember how colour is created and colour is rendered in digital files and on screen.

However if you need a refresher take a look at Colour science, systems and models - Resources for Artists. The aim of this site is to help artists understand more about the science of colour, how it works and how people think (or thought). It was developed as a result of my project about Colour in June/July 2008. The related information site Colour - Resources for Artists which provides links to information and advice about colour and how to understand and analyse it as an artist.

Correcting Colour - how to use RGB levels to move from blue to light cream

This is a demonstration of how you can take a 'blue' image and convert it back to the colour of the paper. I first wrote about this - and tips for correcting colour - in International Sketchcrawl - Great Comp Garden, Kent on my sketchbook blog back in August 2007.


The baseline This is what the photo I took in shade in the garden looked like. I wanted a photograph of the pen and ink sketch before I started adding coloured pencils. I placed my Moleskine sketchbook on the ground in the shade where I was sat and took a photo from above. Although the colour of the Moleskine sketchbook paper is slightly creamy paper it comes out looking blue!

The Colour Profile is in the grey box The grey box on the right hand side shows you what this colour looks like as a colour profile in Levels. You'll notice three peaks in the profile. That's because the red, green and blue (RGB) elements all responded differently and all have their own unique profiles.

Review the red profile: Starting the adjustment using Levels - I first of all selected the red profile from the drop down menu. Below you can see how the image of the sketchbook is unchanged but you can now see the colour profile associated with the colour red - which is very much oriented around the left hand half of the chart.


Adjusting the colour red profile: What I did next was I pulled the little white triangle at the right hand bottom edge of the chart over to the right hand edge of the profile for the colour red. The colour change in the image below is what it looked like with this new profile. If you look closely at the grey colour chart box, you'll see that the white triangle beneath the bottom axis of profile chart has moved from the right hand edge to left of centre of the axis.


Adjusting the colour green and blue profiles: I then repeated this step for the green and blue profiles - see below for the 'after adjustment' image and the change to both colour and colour profile. Note how the colour profiles for blue and green are different.

Green 'after' image above

Blue 'after' image above

I then decided that the image still had a slight blue cast to it, so I used the remove colour cast function (Enhance/Adjust colour/remove colour cast. I clicked on the part of the image which looked the most blue - and got the image you can see below. The paper in the Moleskine sketchbook is back to looking slightly cream - and you can see the pen and ink drawing done in Great Comp Garden prior to the addition of coloured pencils.

The final version - after adjustments for levels and colour cast

Just to round this off, this is what the sketch looked like after the addition of coloured pencil - as done on a very hot and sunny afternoon in Kent.

Great Comp Garden
pen and sepia ink and coloured pencil in Moleskine sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

And there's more......

There are other ways of also making adjustments. I'll highlight another one next Saturday.

Making a Mark reviews......
Posted by Making A Mark on Saturday, July 04, 2009 5 comments
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Friday, July 03, 2009

David Hockney - recent exhibitions

This is an overview of recent work by David Hockney. It highlights two current exhibitions and also provides a review of one of them - the exhibition of David Hockney's work Drawing in a Printing Machine at Annely Juda Fine Art - which I saw last week.

This post also includes lots of links to places where you can images of his recent work the Internet.

Where you can see Hockney's recent work

Hockney has been painting trees and Yorkshire for the last four years and latterly has been developing digital art using a drawing tablet.

Somewhat surprisingly, there are virtually no images of his current work on the official website Hockney Pictures. Or at least that's what you think.....until you start to dig through the exhibition pages - at which point you can find a number of the recent paintings executed in Yorkshire - but not all.

Here are some of the places where you can see Hockney's work from the last few years. Click the hyperlinks to see images of some of the works in the exhibitions

Front Cover of the Catalogue for the Just Nature exhibition
  • David Hockney - Just Nature - Kunsthalle Würth, Schwäbisch Hall 27th April 2009 – 27th September 2009 (Note: This is INCORRECTLY assigned to dates in 2008 on the official Hockney Pictures website). This is a major exhibition of over 70 new Yorkshire landscape paintings, drawings and prints. For those wanting to visit this is a link to its location (east of Heidelburg and north of Stuttgart). The catalogue for this exhibition is available from the publishers Swiridoff. I was able to buy my copy this week at Tate Britain. It's horrendously expensive (about twice the normal cost of a hardback catalogue) - but that's probably because it's two books in one - one half is in German and the other half is in English. I'll be reviewing this on Making A Mark Reviews tomorrow
Hockney’s somewhat unreal-looking version of “realism” arises from the combination of emotion and perspective in his painting. In order to capture a motif as a whole, he not only relies on continual shifts from close-up to distant viewpoints but on a gradual development of the picture, which often consists of several equal-sized canvases. In this way, he creates extended formats that enable the viewer to virtually roam through the picture. The eye is drawn so close to the visual scenes that we have the feeling of actually standing inside the unframed views. In addition, there are entire series of works in which the artist observes selected landscape motifs at different times of day or different seasons and depicts his impressions with great precision. The colours, that change with the intensity of the sunlight, are translated into colourful, energetic images that reflect the immediacy of natural light.
David Hockney Just Nature. - Kunsthalle Würth, Schwäbisch Hall (Preview)
  • David Hockney - Drawing in a Printing Machine - LA Louver, Venice, California 26th February - 28th March 2009
  • David Hockney - Drawing in a Printing Machine - Annely Juda, London. 1 May - 11 July 2009 - see review below. This is different from the exhibition in California due to a new set of portraits also being shown.
  • David Hockney - Looking at Woldgate Woods - The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago Il 25th April - 18th July, 2008 - multi canvas works of a view of Woldgate Woods through the seasons
  • Hockney on Turner Watercolours - Tate Britain, June 11, 2007 - January 20, 2008. This included an exhibition of the series of multi-panel works of Woldgate Woods - which he was seen painting in the David Hockney - A Bigger Picture documentary
  • Summer Exhibition 2007, Royal Academy of Art - feature spot for Bigger Trees near Warter - 50 canvases making up a work which is 180" x 480"
  • David Hockney - A Year in Yorkshire - Annely Juda Fine Art (exhibited 15 September - 28 October 2006) - go to Previous Exhibitions and scroll down and then click the link to see images of all the work displayed. These pictures are oils on canvas and were painted when Hockney returned to Yorkshire due to the illness of family members.
Hockney painted these works over the last year from July 2005. The paintings span the four seasons through the scorched landscape of summer, the autumn mists, frozen winter scenes and the blossoming of spring. They were painted in East Yorkshire, outside in the countryside he knows and loves so well.
The watercolours in Hand Eye Heart are the result of Hockney’s extended visits to East Yorkshire during late 2003 and 2004. This landscape first engaged the artist’s imagination as a teenager when he worked the fields, stooking corn.

Hockney’s embrace of watercolour affords him the ability to capture the subtleties of the ever-changing weather patterns and diffused light of the northern landscape. Venturing out on long drives with paintbrushes and small pots of paint in hand, Hockney made small watercolour studies in a notebook. Later in the studio, he worked up the studies to large paintings, using single or double sheets of thick paper that support the swaths of watercolour paint and layering of colour.
Drawing in a Printing Machine (Annely Juda 1 May - 11 July 2009)

The main lesson for me from this exhibition is that digital art is just like any other art - the quality of the outcome very much depends on the artist who is wielding the stylus. Good artists - who have learned how to use Photoshop - can produce good digital art. Bad artists produce bad art no matter what media they use!

Hockney has discovered what can be done using Photoshop with modern computers. They now do what he wants them to do and can 'redraw' and keep up with the speed of his drawing.

All the works in the exhibition are giclee prints of Hockney/computer generated files - printed (I understand) using Epson printers on archival paper. As he points out they're not photographic reproductions. They only exist because Hockney created them in a computer. The artwork is being produced as signed limited edition prints in small editions of between 7 and 30.

This exhibition comprises
  • landscapes (4th floor) - most of which were previously exhibited in Los Angeles (see below)
  • portraits of colleagues and friends in the UK (3rd floor) - being exhibited for the first time.
Click on the installation shots on the Annely Juda website page for the exhibition to see what they all look like in the exhibition. A fully illustrated 72 page hardback catalogue is available on request.

The catalogue opens with a photograph of him sat in front of the biggest Mac screen drawing on the biggest digital graphics drawing tablet money can buy - and he's creating art in just the same way as he would do if he was painting in oils or drawing portraits with coloured pencils.

Landscapes: There are 10 landscapes from Hockney’s Yorkshire homeland. These include Less Trees 2009 the work produced after he arrived at a copse near Warter that he'd been painting through the seasons only to discover that this was in fact commercial timber and it had all been felled - see The Guardian - David Hockney, the fallen beech trees and the lost canvas. This then his new giclee print "Less trees near Warter" Saturday 21 March / Sunday 22 March 2009
inkjet printed computer drawing on paper (which is not in the catalogue but is on the Annely Juda website)

I liked the combination of slightly soliarised photos of trees combined with 'digitally drawn' backgrounds. Even the most photographic of the works is not in fact a photo, it's a collage of photos with digital drawing on top. It's so big it took me a bit of time to work how he'd done it - but I got there in the end! :)

A fellow gallery visitor and I both agreed that we much preferred Autumn Leaves in the large print mounted on dibond rather than the same but smaller image as a framed giclee print - with deep white edge - where we both felt it lost impact.

You can also see a couple of images of the landscapes on the internet version of the exhibition review done for the Financial Times - David Hockney, Annely Juda Fine Art, London

Portraits: The sitters for the portraits include Hockney's brother, his sister and friends and colleagues. Hockney won't take commissions and only draws or paint the people he knows. I thought it interesting that a number of them (eg Paul Hockney, his brother) are drawn in a pose which shows them using technology to keep themselves occupied while sitting. Obviously the modern solution to keeping the model awake as Hockney does not make small talk while he paints portraits.

I couldn't work out whether or he not he started from photographs or not. It's certainly the case that proportions look good - but then they also look very much like his oil and watercolour portraits of friends which rather suggests this is more down to the skills of the artist. Interestingly, despite the fact he's working with digital brushes and pens/pencils he takes a very similar approach to working in other media. Torso, limbs and surrounds are simple and sketchily presented - big shapes rather than lots of detail which are sometimes blurry. Hockney loves drawing - and he pays a lot of attention to drawing the heads and the face. This is where his markmarking reminded me very much of his coloured pencil portraits. He's really making the most of the scope in terms of tools on offer for different types and width of marks made.

Interestingly the 18 portraits on display are exhibition specials and have been framed without glass so that they look rather like box canvases. In reality those buying these limited edition prints will be getting a work which has a white border - with the all important limited edition numbering and the signature - and a glazed frame.

I feel quite strongly that Hockney has more work to do in identifying how best to display the work and present it in an archival format. There's scope to create a new way of displaying digital prints and I'm sure he'll work what this is!

You can read other reviews of this exhibition:
Conclusions

I can't help thinking that David Hockney is now painting his roots (no pun intended) - in oil and in digital media - and for posterity. He's of an age when one never knows just how long the ability to paint plein air will last. This particular exhibition have me the impression that he now wants to create a body of work about Yorkshire in a variety of media - watercolour, oil and now digital artwork based on photographs.

For me, in an odd sort of way he captures the essence of the landscape much more so than those who are painting in a completely realistic way. He distorts perspective and yet makes it seem more real. He doesn't pay attention to every last detail and is economical with his mark-making - and yet makes us see landscapes again and in a fresh way.

I do however feel that his work benefits enormously from being seen in a series. I'm reminded very much of what I learned about Monet when I was researching his series - about how an exhibition of work on a theme has its own identity and provides an enhanced sense of the resonance of individual pieces. It's certainly the case when you see the series of paintings of Yorkshire trees that you get a sense of the whole being bigger than the sum of the individual parts.

If you're interested in David Hockney, you can find a lot more information about him and his work in my information site - David Hockney - Resources for Artists

Links:
Posted by Making A Mark on Friday, July 03, 2009 2 comments
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Thursday, July 02, 2009

Review: David Hockney - A Bigger Picture

BBC TV - Imagine - David Hockney a Bigger Picture

David Hockney was recently voted the UK's favourite living artist - by virtue of being the highest placed UK artist in The Times Top 200 Artists of the 20th Century to Now

On Tuesday night I watched Bruno Wollheim's film David Hockney - A Bigger Picture about David Hockney and his return to both Yorkshire and painting. You can read Brono Wolheim's own account of making the film in this Daily Telegraph article David Hockney profile for A Bigger Picture and this article Making the bigger picture with David Hockney

How you can watch this film

First - for those who didn't see it
  • if you live in the UK - you can catch up using the version on the BBC iplayer David Hockney - A Bigger Picture
  • Wherever you live, you can also see small excerpts from some of the filming on Bruno Wollheim's own Coluga Pictures website. Click the link to see:
    • Hockney painting a watercolour and talking about Rembrandt
    • Click "Latest" in the menu on the left to see links to two further clips from the film in the drop down menu
    • Click "The Making Of" to see Bruno Wollheim talking about the making of the film and yet further clips - some of which didn't make it to the final edit
    • Click "Reviews" to see some of what has been said about this film so far.
Next - the good news - there is going to be a DVD. I've asked for details and I'm currently waiting to hear about a publication date an distribution arrangements (bookmark this post for an update).

Why you should watch this film

It's unusual to be able to see a film of an artist working through a process of both changing direction and creating work. It's even more unusual to see a documentary about an artist towards the end of their career. All too often we see documentaries after they are dead with extracts of interviews filmed by different people.

This film records the move from California back to East Yorkshire - back to his home in Bridlington and the Yorkshire Wolds which are beautiful, unspoilt and very quiet - and back to painting.

It's apparent from the interview with Bruno Wollheim that he wasn't too sure what the film was going to be about when he started or how it would finish up. Personally I'd have liked to see it continue with Hockney's recent developments in digital art but I guess it needed to end somewhere and the focus on painting makes for a more coherent documentary. Plus it leaves space for another one about the digital art!

I'm very happy with documentaries which place an emphasis on observation, listening and asking salient questions from time to time - they give you time to think and to respond to what you see and hear. It seemed to me that this documentary was very much about letting Hockney talk for himself about the things he wanted to talk about.

There were also various mini-themes within the documentary
  • about transitions towards the end of his career - and how these impacted on his sense of place and home. It struck me that the deaths of both his mother and of Stanley (his dachshund) were both important in bringing him back to live in the UK. He now lives in his mother's house in Bridlington and he loves the fact that the office is in LA and he never gets disturbed during his painting time in the day!
  • about photography and its place in his work -
I don't look through the camera anymore
David Hockney
  • about what's involved in painting
You need three things for painting - the hand, the eye and the heart
David Hockney quoting a Chinese proverb
  • about painting his childhood (he used to work stooking corn in some of the fields he has painted) and painting for posterity
  • about painting as an extreme sport - painting nature outside in all weathers - stripping painting down to the essentials
  • about perspective and the principle of the moving focus - and how this affects how you portray landscape. He's very interested in ancient Chinese scrolls where the landscape is painted as a continuous painting in a massive 'landscape format' where you can only see part of it any one time
  • about drawing - with a brush; how drawing enables you to see more and how drawing more also enables you to work faster
  • about the process of seeing and how pictures are the product of subjective experience
We always see with memory.... we can't be looking at the same thing as everybody's memory is different"
David Hockney
It's a real Royal Academy Picture - the big one
David Hockney

In terms of visual images, we see him, with his assistant, setting up his easel and folding table for paints at the side of tracks and Hockney painting - in all weather. He obviously became very good at knowing how many layers are required to keep the cold out! We also see paintings set in their context and in front of the views which are being painted.

As the film progresses we begin to see him working on more canvases at one time - plein air. Plus we're not talking about small canvases - these are big ones. Every plein air painter will identify with the moments when the easels fell over! I did spend some time wondering how they managed to keep the canvases from blowing off the easel!

Wollheim comments on how the subject matter seems unremarkable to him, subjects he wouldn't notice. Hockney comments that making something quite different out of it - through painting - is what makes it attractive. His style of painting is apparently naive and yet, as with Van Gogh, it involves some very complex mark-making within a simplified vision. He strips out all that is unnecessary. He's creating work which is representational and yet is nowhere near photographic.

What was fascinating was that the only time he ever saw Bigger Trees near Warter as a whole while painting it was on a computer screen. Each canvas was photographed individually and then each canvas was added into a matrix of completed canvases which made up the bigger picture. (I'm still trying to work out how they managed the stitching and the file size!) The work was erected with some difficulty just once to check it before it was delivered to the RA for the Summer Exhibition of 2007. You can read about how Bigger Trees near Warter was developed in this interview The bigger picture with Martin Gayford for the Daily Telegraph.

It struck me also that Hockney was maybe 'doing a Monet' - painting a work deliberately for posterity, like the large panels of the Nypheas at the Musee de l'Oorangerie, to give to the nation - which indeed happened with Bigger Trees near Warter when it was donated to the Tate. (The painting is due to go on exhibition in the Autumn of 2009) In fact the catalogue for the German exhibition mentions Hockney visiting the Musee Orangerie to see Monet's panels when it reopened in Paris in 2006.
The Tate called Hockney's donation one of the most generous gifts presented by an artist to a British gallery in recent years.
Independent - Hockney donates biggest painting to Tate

Hockney is knowledgeable about art history and dropped quotations from other artists into the conversation from time to time
Never believe what an artist says, only what they do
Walter Sickert
The radical departure of this documentary is that Hockney wanted to b seen painting. I couldn't help thinking, when I heard a comment later in the documentary, that being filmed painting was maybe his way of emphasising the fact that HE created his work and this was the difference between his work and that of artists whose work is painted by other people and they just sign it at the end! (I think it might have given him great satisfaction to know that he beat Hirst to being the most popular living artist in the UK - he was ranked 33 in the Times Poll while Hirst came in at #53! I guess he must have even more pleased that his 'mentor' Pablo Picasso came top!).

Maybe Hockney's decision to invest both time and effort in this project was about him demonstrating that it's important for an artist's reputation and longevity to be seen to do and not just to have "a good idea".

Whatever his reasons, I thought this was a fascinating film which all Hockneyphiles will want to rush out and buy on DVD - it will certainly repay repeat viewing.

You can also read Vivien Blackburn's perspective on the documentary here in David Hockney. review

More posts about Hockney

Tomorrow I'm going to be reviewing his exhibition Drawing in a Printing Machine at Annely Juda Fine Art

On Making A Mark Reviews, I'm also going to be reviewing the catalogue of David Hockney Nur Nature Just Nature - the German/English language catalogue for the current exhibition at Kunsthalle Wurth - which I bought at Tate Britain on Tuesday.

Links:
Posted by Making A Mark on Thursday, July 02, 2009 6 comments
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009

MAM Poll July: Which are your preferred media for painting in the studio?

The Making A Mark Poll for July is taking a look at which are our preferred media for painting in the studio.

This is so we can round off our perspective on the media people like to use. Last month we looked at your preferred plein air painting media and in May we found out which media people like to use when drawing or sketching

Cornelissen's - the pigment and paint counter
(see Art shops in London)
photo copyright Katherine Tyrrell

What is "painting"?

That's a really good question - as the word relates to both the process and the end result. Here's a couple of definitions from the Glossary maintained by the Tate Museum and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Painting
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).
Tate - Glossary - painting

painting - overview
Art consisting of representational, imaginative, or abstract designs produced by application of coloured paints to a two-dimensional, prepared, flat surface.

The elements of design (i.e., line, colour, tone, texture) are used in various ways to produce sensations of volume, space, movement, and light. The range of media (e.g., tempera, fresco, oil, watercolour, ink, gouache, encaustic, casein) and the choice of a particular form (e.g., mural, easel, panel, miniature, illuminated manuscript, scroll, screen, fan) combine to realize a unique visual image. Painting as an art form dates back to prehistoric cave paintings.
Encyclopedia Britannica

I'm going to keep this really simple and say that from my perspective, I'd differentiate painting as a process and a formal painting as an end product from a sketch or a preliminary study by saying that painting involves:
  • the application of media using a brush
  • and/or converting pigment into a liquid medium
  • and/or typically covers the support completely
Having said that - pastel is included because the earliest cave paintings are created from dry media!

Media options for painting in the studio

The pros and cons for painting in the studio are a little different than those related to painting plein air. If you have a particular view or perspective on this please do comment on the pros and cons of different media.

The media options in the Opinion Poll are as follows:
  • traditional oils
  • water miscible oils
  • alkyds (fast drying oils)
  • acrylics
  • watercolour (pans and tubes)
  • gouache
  • casein
  • artist quality ink
  • tempera
  • soft/hard pastels
  • oil pastels
  • coloured pencils
  • encaustic (hot wax painting)
  • mixed media
You'll note that I've added in coloured pencils (many artists use this with solvent) with solvent and encaustic.

You can find the poll in the right hand column - underneath all the smiley faces of my blog 'followers'. As last month, the poll allows multiple responses based on media used on a regular basis rather than those you might use occasionally.

The Poll finishes early on 31st July and I'll post an analysis of the results later the same day. Then the next poll on a new topic will start on 1st August.

Why do you like your chosen media? Do you have any tips you'd like to share?

Please comment - I'd love to hear about why you chose the medium you now work with.
  • If you use a different media in the studio compared to when painting plein air I'd be interested hear your reasons behind this decision.
  • If you've got any tips for working in the studio with your chosen media please leave them as a comment
Links:
Making a Mark reviews......

Posted by Making A Mark on Wednesday, July 01, 2009 7 comments
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