Mason - What is Painting?

Mason - What is Painting?

~ What is painting? Are there specific tools/ surface/ media interaction that define this act? Must it be 2-D and does it require a frame/ boundary to exist?

For me, I have always viewed painting as something that requires strokes and a medium, most often brushes and paint. I believe my first experience with painting was in preschool with nothing but our fingers and chocolate pudding. I also believe that, to qualify as a "painting", the use of a tool in a medium must produce a visually pleasing aesthetic. Not to confuse "a painting" with "painting", which one might argue could be applied to painting interior or exterior walls of a house. That to me, is not considered "a painting" (which is a finished work altering the surface of another object to be something other than what it already is). Lately I have been seeing examples of non-2D painting, such as bodypainting, creating illusions of classical paintings on bodies and other objects, etc., so I do not think painting is required to be 2D nor does it require a frame.

~ Must painting be graphic in nature? Elaborate with at least 2 examples.

I don't think paintings need to be graphic in nature, nor figurative. They can be a collection of organic shapes, geometric shapes, abstract forms of expression, or graphic representations. For example, Jackson Pollock's paintings do not have clear figuration - that is, most of us do not recognize any shapes or images when we first look at his paintings. Yet the combination of lines and colors are visually pleasing, and so we call it "a painting". This is in contrast to a "painting" that I observed at an art gallery several years ago, which I thought was a terrible example of art - it was a 15 ft by 8 ft large piece of scrap wood that was entirely painted white with what looked like whitewash, and had a few envelopes stuck here and there in a random pattern with nails. I did not see any rhyme or reason to that - it did not invoke any deep thought from me other than "I could do that myself easily!". I was rather shocked at the $15,000 price tag stuck on it. Another example of paintings with no graphic representations of objects might be Mondrian, who used just bold colors and lines. We would recognize shapes such as squares and rectangles but little else. We are encouraged to consider these collections of lines, shapes and colors and their meaning, which to me is more a form of art than say a similarly patterned wallpaper whose purpose is merely for decoration.

~ Does the act of painting necessarily result in a painting? Are the two mutually inclusive? Explain.

No, because one can use brushstrokes or tools to apply paint to a surface such as a wall or furniture and the end result is only a change in color of that object, not an arrangement of colors and lines to invoke the viewer to think differently about that particular object or surface.

~ Does painting serve as the basis for other forms of art or stand on its own? Does it matter that we make a distinction?

Yes, I think painting can serve as the basis for other forms of art. For example, painting robots have been created, where the robot itself is also considered a work of art, in the fact that its sole purpose is to create its own paintings. I also believe that in forms of "street art" or "performance art" such as people painted to blend into their background and surroundings, people's faces painted to look as if they were classical paintings, and even collections of objects arranged and painted so that the combination of paint and shadows create an entirely different image, all of these are not paintings per se, in the sense that you could hang them up on the wall, but that they use the art of painting to create an entirely new art form.

~ Find three examples you feel best exemplify PAINTING with captions (artist, medium, date, size) and an explanation on WHY you chose these.

The Deep by Jackson Pollock. 1953. Oil and Enamel on canvas. 59.3 in. x 86.8 in. Currently in Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France

Untitled by Curtis Welborn. 2012. Acrylic and Gesso on canvas. 4.5 ft x 2.5 ft. Currently hanging on our living room wall (Albuquerque, NM)

Under One Umbrella by Leonid Afremov. 30"x36". Palette Knife Oil on Canvas. Boca Raton, Florida.

I chose the painting by Jackson Pollock, because it is slightly different than many of his other paintings, yet invokes a really strong emotion inside me - I am captured by the movement within the painting, and how the colors together remind me of something. I feel that even though many of my favorite paintings involve people, landscapes, objects, that a really good painting also has the power to grab your attention by being nothing more than an artist's expression through colors and shapes. I chose the second painting by Curtis Welborn not only because he is my boyfriend's dad, but because I really enjoyed the visual aesthetic of this painting and how the lines of different color manage to balance each other out despite its apparent noisiness. If I stand and look at the lines, I feel like they start to tell a story, even though there is nothing there (or is there?). Doing a search for more paintings, I came across this amazing style by Leonid Afremov, and I felt like I had to include it, because he uses bold, bright colors and blocky shapes to create an amazingly detailed scene. I really enjoyed looking through his work, and I chose this one because the "trees" are actually nothing more than splotches of color, yet he is able to arrange them in such a way that your mind creates a picture out of them. I would consider this an example of a very successful painting as well as a great example of a painting using something other than a brush (a palette knife).

Think about how you would answer these questions DIFFERENTLY if you were to answer them under the title "What is drawing?" (replace "painting" with "drawing") I feel like most of my answers would be similar, if not the same, although for drawing, I would choose mediums such as graphite, crayons, colored pencils, etc. I would also argue that sand painting is actually drawing, because you are using a medium to draw lines in order to form a picture, whereas painting (to me), also requires the use of color and blending colors and applying shapes to become a painting. Colored pencils also use color but in order to create shapes, one must create a lot of little lines to form shapes (whereas with painting, you can use small, large, differently shaped brushes, palette knifes, cloth, and many many different objects to apply paint and to create different textures). Drawing does not have to form graphic representations to be considered drawing (although that would be my personal preference), as Dadaism encouraged people to draw and write at random, closing their eyes and letting whatever doodles came out of their current emotional being, and calling it art. I accept that those are considered a form of "drawing", even though I personally am not a fan.