Popular Painting
Pictures painted outside formal art training to fill an order or discharge a vow, usually unsigned, and built from a stock of images used over and over.
Dictionary entry
- Tingatinga 1968– / Style
Edward Saidi Tingatinga began painting in Dar es Salaam with bicycle enamel. Glossy flat color, animals in bold outline and a surface with no empty ground were carried on as a cooperative's house style, and the school became East Africa's defining popular painting.
- Minhwa 17th–19th century / Style
Unnamed painters of late Joseon Korea made pictures for ordinary people. Tigers and magpies, pictorial ideographs and scholar's-shelf still lifes follow set formulas, but composition unbound by perspective and a streak of humor made them a popular visual language that laughs at authority.
- Ex-Voto (Retablo) 18th century– / Style
Mexico's votive paintings give thanks for deliverance from disaster. Painted on tin, they hold the scene of the crisis, a holy image and a handwritten testimony on one small sheet, and the urgency of the untrained brush drew Kahlo and other modern painters to them.