Techniques and methods

Whether a painting reached completion by careful stages or was executed directly by a hit-or-miss alla prima method (in which pigments are laid on in a single application) was once largely determined by the ideals and established techniques of its cultural tradition. For example, the medieval European illuminator’s painstaking procedure, by which a complex linear pattern was gradually enriched with gold leaf and precious pigments, was contemporary with the Song Chinese Chan (Zen) practice of immediate, calligraphic brush painting, following a contemplative period of spiritual self-preparation. More recently, artists have decided the techniques and working methods best suited to their aims and temperaments. In France in the 1880s, for instance, Seurat might be working in his studio on drawings, tone studies, and color schemes in preparation for a large composition at the same time that, outdoors, Monet was endeavoring to capture the effects of afternoon light and atmosphere, while Cézanne analyzed the structure of the mountain Sainte-Victoire with deliberated brush strokes, laid as irrevocably as mosaic tesserae (small pieces, such as marble or tile).

The kind of relationship established between artist and patron, the site and subject matter of a painting commission, and the physical properties of the medium employed may also dictate working procedure. Peter Paul Rubens, for example, followed the businesslike 17th-century custom of submitting a small oil sketch, or modella, for his client’s approval before carrying out a large-scale commission. Siting problems peculiar to mural painting, such as spectator eye level and the scale, style, and function of a building interior, had first to be solved in preparatory drawings and sometimes with the use of wax figurines or scale models of the interior. Scale working drawings are essential to the speed and precision of execution demanded by quick-drying mediums, such as buon fresco (see below) on wet plaster and acrylic resin on canvas. The drawings traditionally are covered with a network of squares, or “squared-up,” for enlarging on the surface of the support. Some modern painters preferred to outline the enlargement of a sketch projected directly onto the support by epidiascope (a projector for images of both opaque and transparent objects).

In Renaissance painters’ workshops, pupil assistants not only ground and mixed the pigments and prepared the supports and painting surfaces but often laid in the outlines and broad masses of the painting from the master’s design and studies.

The inherent properties of its medium or the atmospheric conditions of its site may themselves preserve a painting. The wax solvent binder of encaustic paintings (see below) both retains the intensity and tonality of the original colors and protects the surface from damp. And, while prehistoric rock paintings and buon frescoes are preserved by natural chemical action, the tempera pigments thought to be bound only with water on many ancient Egyptian murals are protected by the dry atmosphere and unvarying temperature of the tombs. It has, however, been customary to varnish oil paintings, both to protect the surface against damage by dirt and handling and to restore the tonality lost when some darker pigments dry out into a higher key. Unfortunately, varnish tends to darken and yellow with time into the sometimes disastrously imitated “Old Masters’ mellow patina.” Once cherished, this amber-gravy film is now generally removed to reveal the colors in their original intensity. Glass began to replace varnish toward the end of the 19th century, when painters wished to retain the fresh, luminous finish of pigments applied directly to a pure white ground. The air-conditioning and temperature-control systems of 21st-century museums make both varnishing and glazing unnecessary, except for older and more fragile exhibits.

The frames surrounding early altarpieces, icons, and cassone panels (painted panels on the chest used for a bride’s household linen) were often structural parts of the support. With the introduction of portable easel pictures, heavy frames not only provided some protection against theft and damage but were considered an aesthetic enhancement to a painting, and frame making became a specialized craft. Gilded gesso moldings (consisting of plaster of paris and sizing that forms the surface for low relief) in extravagant swags of fruit and flowers certainly seem almost an extension of the restless, exuberant design of a Baroque or Rococo painting. A substantial frame also provided a proscenium (in a theater, the area between the orchestra and the curtain) in which the picture was isolated from its immediate surroundings, thus adding to the window view illusion intended by the artist. Deep, ornate frames are often unsuitable for many modern paintings, where the artist’s intention is for forms to appear to advance toward the spectators rather than be viewed by them as if through a wall aperture. In Minimalist paintings no effects of spatial illusionism are intended, and, in order to emphasize the physical shape of the support itself and to stress its flatness, these abstract geometrical designs are displayed without frames or are merely edged with thin protective strips of wood or metal.

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Mediums

By technical definition, mediums are the liquids added to paints to bind them and make them workable. They are discussed here, however, in the wider meaning of all the various paints, tools, supports, surfaces, and techniques employed by painters. The basis of all paints is variously colored pigment, ground to a fine powder. The different expressive capacities and characteristic final surface texture of each medium are determined by the vehicle with which it is bound and thinned, the nature and surface preparation of the support, and the tools and technique with which it is handled.

Pigments are derived from various natural and artificial sources. The oldest and most permanent pigments are the blacks, prepared from bone and charcoal, and the clay earths, such as raw umber and raw sienna, which can be changed by heating into darker, warmer browns. In early periods of painting, readily available pigments were few. Certain intense hues were obtainable only from the rarer minerals, such as cinnabar (orange-red vermilion), lapis lazuli (violet-blue ultramarine), and malachite (green). These were expensive and therefore reserved for focal accents and important symbolic features in the design. The opening of trade routes and the manufacture of synthetic substitutes gradually extended the range of colors available to painters.

Tempera

A tempera medium is dry pigment tempered with an emulsion and thinned with water. The ancient medium was in constant use in most world cultures, until in Europe it was gradually superseded by oil paints during the Renaissance. Tempera was the mural medium in the ancient dynasties of Egypt, Babylonia, Mycenean Greece, and China and was used to decorate the early Christian catacombs. It was employed on a variety of supports, from the stone stelae (or commemorative pillars), mummy cases, and papyrus rolls of ancient Egypt to the wood panels of Byzantine icons and altarpieces and the vellum leaves of medieval illuminated manuscripts.

The word tempera originally came from the verb temper, “to bring to a desired consistency.” Dry pigments are made usable by “tempering” them with a binding and adhesive vehicle. Such painting was distinguished from fresco painting, the colors for which contained no binder. Eventually, after the rise of oil painting, the word gained its present meaning.

The standard tempera vehicle is a natural emulsion, egg yolk, thinned with water. Variants of this vehicle have been developed to widen its use. Among the man-made emulsions are those prepared with whole egg and linseed oil, with gum, and with wax.

The special ground for tempera painting is a rigid wood or wallboard panel coated with several thin layers of gesso, a white, smooth, fully absorbent preparation made of burnt gypsum (or chalk, plaster of Paris, or whiting) and hide (or parchment) glue. A few minutes after application, tempera paint is sufficiently resistant to water to allow overpainting with more color. Thin, transparent layers of paint produce a clear, luminous effect, and the color tones of successive brushstrokes blend optically. Modern tempera paintings are sometimes varnished or overpainted with thin, transparent oil glazes to produce full, deep-toned results, or they are left unglazed for blond, or light, effects.

The great tradition of tempera painting was developed in Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries by Duccio di Buoninsegna and Giotto and continued in the work of Giovanni Bellini, Piero della Francesca, Carlo Crivelli, Sandro Botticelli, and Vittore Carpaccio. The 20th century saw a revival of tempera by American artists Ben Shahn, Andrew Wyeth, and Jacob Lawrence and by the British painter Lucian Freud. Tempera was largely replaced mid-century by acrylic paints.