Painting in our life

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Two French artists of the 1700's Jean Chardin and Maurice Quentin de La Tour, made excellent pastel portraits. Outstanding French artists of the 1800's, including Edouard Manet, Jean Francais Millet, and Pierre Auguste Renoir, often worked in pastel. They captured the visual effects of light and atmosphere in pure pastel colors. Edgar Degas, another French artist of bather, dancers, and people working . Degas's well drawn, brilliantly colored works proved that pastel could be a major painting technique.

Tempera is a technique in which egg yolk is used as the binder. Most egg tempera paintings are done on wood.

A painter usually applies tempera in fine crisp strokes with a painted brush. The paint dries almost immediately into a thin, water-resistant coasting. Tempera dries quickly, and so the brushstrokes do not blend easily. Normally, the artist develops the tones of the picture through a series of thin strokes laid over each other. In a tempera painting, most shapes are sharp and clear. Tones are bright, and details are exact and strong.

An artist should not applies tempera paint too thickly because the paint cracks when applied in heavy layers. Tempera paintings require protection against dirt and scratching, and so he artist usually applies a coat of vanish to the finished picture.

The tempera technique achieved its greatest popularity between 1200 and 1500 in Europe. Beautiful tempera pictures were painted during the 1200's and 1300's in Siena, Italy, by Duccio di Buoninsegna and Simone Martini. Several modern American artists have used tempera skillfully. They include Ben Shahn, Mark Tobey, and Andrew Wyeth.

Oil paint is made by mixing powdered pigments with a binder of vegetable oil. Linseed oil is the most common binder. Certain feature of oil paint make it popular with artists who want to show the natural appearance of the world around them. Oil paint-even when applied thickly - does not crack so easily as does water paint or egg tempera. As a result, the painter can apply oil paint in varying thicknesses to produce a wide range of textures. Each artist develops his or her own method of working with oil paint.

Oil painting first became popular in Europe during the 1500's. By the 1700's it had become the most common painting technique. It remains the technique preferred by many artists today.

No one knows when people first painted pictures. Scholars date the oldest known paintings at about 20,000 B. C. The high quality of these works suggests that people began to paint pictures much earlier.

Egyptian painting. The ancient Egyptians began painting about 5.000 years ago. They developed one of the first definite traditions in the history of the art. Egyptian artists painted on the walls of temples and palaces, but much of their finest work appears in tombs. Like other early peoples, the Egyptians believed that art was a magical way of transporting things of this world into a world people entered after death. Egyptian artists decorated tombs with frescoes showing persons and objects related to the life of the dead. Egyptian artists painted according to strict rules that hardly changed for thousands of years. The figures they drew look stiff. The heads of people in the painting always face sideways. The shoulders and body face to the front, and the feet paint to the side. Important persons are larger than the other people.

Artists painted tombs only for the benefit of the gods and the souls of the dead. The tombs were scaled and beautifully colored frescoes were intended never again to be seen.

Cretan painting. About 3000 B. C. - while Egyptian civilization was flourishing - another great civilization was developing on the island of Crete. The Cretans, a seafaring people, often came into contact with the Egyptians. The Cretans adopted some elements of Egyptians art, including the Egyptian way of drawing human figure. But the Cretan style

did not have the stiffness of the Egyptian style Cretan paintings are lively, and the figures in them seem to float and dance. More important. Cretan painters, unlike the Egyptians, were interested in life in this world. They used paintings to decorate buildings instead of concealing the paintings in tombs. Thus, Cretan art became a bridge between Egyptian art, which emphasized death, and ancient Greek and Roman art, which dealt with life.

Реферат опубликован: 18/02/2007