Painting

[4][a] In November 2018, scientists reported the discovery of the then-oldest known figurative art painting, over 40,000 (perhaps as old as 52,000) years old, of an unknown animal, in the cave of Lubang Jeriji Saléh on the Indonesian island of Borneo.

[6][7] In December 2019, cave paintings portraying pig hunting within the Maros-Pangkep karst region in Sulawesi were discovered to be even older, with an estimated age of at least 43,900 years.

A series of art movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—notably Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Dadaism—challenged the Renaissance view of the world.

Artists continue to make important works of art in a wide variety of styles and aesthetic temperaments—their merits are left to the public and the marketplace to judge.

There is a growing community of artists who use computers to "paint" color onto a digital "canvas" using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others.

Jean Metzinger's mosaic-like Divisionist technique had its parallel in literature; a characteristic of the alliance between Symbolist writers and Neo-Impressionist artists: I ask of divided brushwork not the objective rendering of light, but iridescences and certain aspects of color still foreign to painting.

I make a kind of chromatic versification and for syllables, I use strokes which, variable in quantity, cannot differ in dimension without modifying the rhythm of a pictorial phraseology destined to translate the diverse emotions aroused by nature.

[24][25] Kandinsky's stage design for a performance of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition illustrates his "synaesthetic" concept of a universal correspondence of forms, colors and musical sounds.

Plato disregarded painters (as well as sculptors) in his philosophical system; he maintained that painting cannot depict the truth—it is a copy of reality (a shadow of the world of ideas) and is nothing but a craft, similar to shoemaking or iron casting.

Leonardo da Vinci, on the contrary, said that "Italian: La Pittura è cosa mentale" ("English: painting is a thing of the mind").

Hegel recognized the failure of attaining a universal concept of beauty and, in his aesthetic essay, wrote that painting is one of the three "romantic" arts, along with Poetry and Music, for its symbolic, highly intellectual purpose.

[32][33] In his essay, Kandinsky maintains that painting has a spiritual value, and he attaches primary colors to essential feelings or concepts, something that Goethe and other writers had already tried to do.

[34] In 1890, the Parisian painter Maurice Denis famously asserted: "Remember that a painting—before being a warhorse, a naked woman or some story or other—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.

Ink can be a complex medium, composed of solvents, pigments, dyes, resins, lubricants, solubilizers, surfactants, particulate matter, fluorescers, and other materials.

Unlike most painted techniques, the surface can be handled and wetted Enamels have traditionally been used for decoration of precious objects,[42] but have also been used for other purposes.

[45] The pigments used in pastels are the same as those used to produce all colored art media, including oil paints; the binder is of a neutral hue and low saturation.

[46] Because the surface of a pastel painting is fragile and easily smudged, its preservation requires protective measures such as framing under glass; it may also be sprayed with a fixative.

This slow drying aspect of oil can be seen as an advantage for certain techniques but may also impede the artist's ability to work quickly.

In the late 1970s, street graffiti writers' signatures and murals became more elaborate, and a unique style developed as a factor of the aerosol medium and the speed required for illicit work.

[61] Sarah Maple, a contemporary artist, has used her menstrual blood to create portraits to help erase the taboo covering the topic of periods.

Hyperrealism is a fully-fledged school of art and can be considered an advancement of Photorealism by the methods used to create the resulting paintings or sculptures.

From the 1920s onward, the movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts, literature, film and music of many countries, as well as political thought and practice, philosophy and social theory.

[90] Pattachitra is a general term for traditional, cloth-based scroll painting, based in the eastern Indian states of Odisha and West Bengal.

The tradition of still life painting appears to have started and was far more popular in the contemporary Low Countries, today Belgium and Netherlands (then Flemish and Dutch artists), than it ever was in southern Europe.

In Spain, there were much fewer patrons for this sort of thing, but a type of breakfast piece did become popular, featuring a few objects of food and tableware laid on a table.

But as the result of computer game and comic industry growth, illustrations are becoming valued as popular and profitable artworks that can acquire a wider market than the other two, especially in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and the United States.

[106] Among the best-known illustrators of that period were N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle of the Brandywine School, James Montgomery Flagg, Elizabeth Shippen Green, J. C. Leyendecker, Violet Oakley, Maxfield Parrish, Jessie Willcox Smith, and John Rea Neill.

[107] Landscape painting is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, lakes, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition.

[111][112][113] A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects—which may be either natural (food, flowers, plants, rocks, or shells) or human-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on).

Some modern still life breaks the two-dimensional barrier and employs three-dimensional mixed media, and uses found objects, photography, computer graphics, as well as video and sound.