painting - Works of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is either a tightly stretched piece of canvas or a panel. How the ground (on which paint is applied) is prepared on the support depends greatly on the type of paint to be used. Paintings are usually intended to be placed in frames, and exhibited on walls, but there have been plenty of exceptions. Also, the act of painting, which may involve a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's other concerns which effect the content of a work.

• "First I saw the mountains in the painting; then I saw the painting in the mountains."
  Chinese Proverb. See Chinese art.
  
  
• "A man paints with his brains and not with his hands."
  Michelangelo (1475-1564), Italian Renaissance artist.
  
  
• "Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things."
  Edgar Degas (1834-1917), French Impressionist artist.
  
  
• "Painting is very easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."
  Edgar Degas.
  
  
• "Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also."
  Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), French Post-Impressionist painter. Quoted by Émile Bernard, L'Occident, July, 1904. See drawing.
  
  
• "PAINTING, n: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic."
  Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), American writer. The Cynic's Word Book, also known as The Devil's Dictionary, 1906. See art critic and art criticism.
  
  
• "Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!"
  Max Liebermann (1847-1935).
  
  
• "There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature."
  G.K.Chesterton (1874-1936), British writer. Autobiography.
  
  
• "Painting is stronger than I am. It can make me do whatever it wants."
  Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), modern Spanish artist. A note written on the back of one of his sketchbooks. See Cubism.
  
  
• "Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."
  Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), modern Spanish artist.
  
  
• "Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen."
  Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish artist. Quoted in: Jean Cocteau, Journals, part 1, "War and Peace" (1956).
  
  
• "To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society."
  Man Ray (1890-1976), modern American photographer, artist. Self Portrait, chapter 6 (1963). See Dada, photography, readymade, and Surrealism.
  
  
• "The painting has a life of its own."
  Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), American Abstract Expressionist painter.
  
  
• "Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings."
  George Tooker (1920-), contemporary American painter.

• "Chalkboard" on color theory, painting materials and techniques. Here is information on stretching canvas, preparing grounds, brushes, palette knives, palettes, drawing, colors, types of paint and how to control them. Chalkboard comes from the College of Art at Southern Arkansas University.

Also see the types of media used in painting, such as acrylic, casein, enamel, encaustic, fresco, gouache, lacquer, oil, pastel, tempera, watercolor, etc., as well as the names of painting tools, techniques, schools, periods, movements, styles, miniature, mosaic, mural, digital imaging, stretcher, and so on.

Also see abbozzo, blot, easel, feather and feathering, grisaille, incrustation, interdisciplinary, marbling, sinopia, underpainting, and universal artwork.

https://inform.quest/_art