Painting

Paintings is the way of creating pictures by applying color to a surface like canvas. Paintings can tell stories, express emotions, express ideas, decorate walls and many other things.

Painting began many years ago, early humans used charcoal and minerals to create powders which they used to make images on cave walls. Sometimes they mixed the powder with saliva or animal fat which formed a fluid which they could use as paint, they most likely applied the fluid with their fingers. 

Artists normally create paintings of visible world: 

• People

• Landscape

• Still life

• Historic Scenes

This table shows us the Key Schools of Painting

SCHOOL	CENTURY	KEY WORKS
Gothic	13th–15th	The Annunciation, Simone Martini
Renaissance	14th–16th	The Arnolfini Marriage , van Eyck School of Athens, Raphael
Baroque	17th–18th	The Descent from the Cross, Rubens
Rococo	17th–18th	The Swing, Fragonard
Neoclassicism	18th–19th	The Oath of the Horatii , David
Romanticism	18th–19th	The Raft of the Medusa, Géricault
Impressionism & Post-Impressionism	Late 19th	Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, Renoir; Mont Ste Victoire, Cezanne
Cubism	20th	Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso

There's two different ways of painting, the realistic painting which makes the painting look like something real. The second way of painting is the abstract way which is not supposed to look like anything from the real world, but different colors, shapes and lines are used to express ideas, feeling and moods.

Paintings are flat where the real world is three dimensional, most artists use methods such as perspective painting to make the painting look like its real. Perspective is a way of showing the three dimensional things on a two dimensional surface. In the real world the further away the object is the smaller it looks, and the parallel lines appear to meet. The perspective mimics this. 

The perspective was developed in Italy by two painters Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472)

 Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) they made a mathematical system which they experimented with. The invention of perspective enabled artists to accurately represent three dimensional objects on a 2 dimensional surface.

The Vanishing point could be described as a line where the sky meets the land. The vanishing point is a spot where lines which are parallel in reality appear to converge in the distance on the painting. As the lines move inward toward the vanishing point they lead people’s eyes into the painting imaginary depth.

The Mona Lisa is a portait of a woman by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, the painting has been acclaimed as: the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about and the most parodied work of art in the world.