Painting Techniques
The thread is how light and depth get raised on a flat surface, running from painted illusion through broken brushwork to gradients built inside a computer.
Dictionary entry
- Gradient Mesh digital–contemporary / Technique
Blends several color focal points smoothly, giving a flat plane the depth of light and atmosphere.
- Trompe-l'œil antiquity–present / Technique
Hides the picture plane's boundary, aligning material, shadow and scale until you believe the thing is there.
- Chiaroscuro 16th century– / Technique
It carves form out of strong contrast and lets light itself tell the story and carry the feeling. The grammar of that light runs from painting through to film noir.
- Magic Realism 1925–1970s / Style
Painting whose handling is scrupulously realist, yet whose light, placement and silence tip reality one notch out of true. It uses none of Surrealism's distortions; instead it sets ordinary things down with uncanny clarity, summoning unease and stillness at once. The name comes from German art criticism of 1925.
- Novecento Italiano 1922–1943 / Style
A movement that, after the avant-garde had dismantled form, sought a return to the mass and stillness of Italian classicism. Simplified, solid bodies, subdued earth colour and emphatically frontal composition became the vocabulary of interwar public building and mural painting. A leading case of the return to order, and one that has to be read together with its closeness to the regime.
- Impressionism 1860s–1880s / Style
A movement that went outdoors and caught light itself with rapid strokes. It abandoned the contour line, laid shadows in complementary colors rather than black, and painted the same subject differently at each hour of the day. Nearly every avant-garde that followed defined itself by agreeing or disagreeing with it.
- Post-Impressionism 1880s–1900s / Style
A collective name for painters who found the improvisation of Impressionism insufficient and recovered structure, symbol and emotion, each in their own way. It is not one style but several answers standing side by side, among them pointillism, flat fields of color and surging brushwork. Twentieth century abstraction branched off from here.