More Art Zones
|
Monumental architecture influenced and stimulated all the other arts. The painter, no less than the sculptor, made his contribution. Coloured surfaces were indispensable to architecture for the reason that man craves for colour in his daily existence; mosaic work and glass windows were particularly well suited to this end.
But painting as such was soon introduced. Man's desire for colour goes back to prehistoric times. It even became the symbol of life, as several early myths show. Neanderthal man was buried with the ochre that he probably used on his own person. Before long, man was painting everything that would take colour. The walls of Greek and Egyptian temples, and Egyptian, Greek and medieval statues were all decorated with colours.
Coloured pottery survives from the pre-dynastic age in China and from the earliest known Mexican civilisations, as well as from the so-called Hallstatt period. Such pottery shows that the sense of colour was already well developed. Although painted objects appeared before pictures, the latter are known to us from as early as the Ice Age and from early Mediterranean civilisations, particularly those of Crete, Greece and the Etruscans. There we find the fresco, the most important method of wall painting, which is still practised, and the now less frequently used encaustic technique (a form of painting with wax).
But there was an intermediate stage between mere colouring and true painting. It consisted in filling-in outlined areas with paint, and men contented themselves with this for centuries. Line and colour were placed on an equal footing. Colouring a carefully made drawing in this way led to the art of the medieval illuminator, who worked in water colours. Medieval panel paintings, in tempera, also lent themselves to this technique. Long after Dutch and Flemish painters of the 15th century had fully exploited the new invention of oil colours, German early 19th-century painters like Cornelius, Kaulbach and others reverted to the older method.
We speak of 'pure' painting where the composition is built up entirely of colour and is not based on a pattern of lines. The dress of the child in Rembrandt's 'Family Portrait' consists only of a series of carefully nuanced colours. This presupposes a very sure sense of the quality of colour, which is quite a different thing from mere intensity. Each colour of the spectrum has a certain degree of brilliance of its own which, quite apart from its intensity, can be expressed as a shade of grey. But individual colours also produce special effects. Thus, red seems closer to the eye than blue; it belongs to what we call the warm colours (red and yellow), as opposed to the cold colours (blue and green) which are more 'distant'.
True painting relies exclusively upon the qualities inherent in the paints, and does not depend on any other method of representation. Since the outline naturally follows the form of an object, its use introduces a sculptural element, which the 'pure' painter tries to avoid. With this end in view, Leonardo da Vinci invented sfumato. Its function is to make the picture appear as if a veil had been placed over it or as if it is enveloped in a mist, whereby all the outlines have become blurred and indefinite. An effect of a similar kind is achieved in 'tonal' painting where one basic colour tone is used. In Vermeer's case this was blue, whilst Rembrandt and other Flemish and Dutch painters used a golden brown. This basic tone suffuses all the other colours; it is either used as a 'ground' and shines through them, or is laid over them to form a last layer of colour.
But in 'tonal' painting the picture suffers from a lack of colour contrast. In an attempt to retain the full benefit of colour without confining it to clearly defined areas, painters devised a new method. The tools -- brush or spatula -- were used in such a way that they left clear traces on the surface and produced a rough relief-like effect. This notwithstanding, the picture acquires no sculptural attributes, because the depth of the paint has nothing to do with the shapes of the objects portrayed. The areas where it is most thickly applied correspond with the high-lights, and are apprehended by the eye only and not by the sense of touch. This technique was called impasto painting and has been widely used from Titian to the present day. The layman tends to regard it as an unnecessary 'messing about with paint', not realizing that this is the way to teach the eye to experience pure painting.
A heavy impasto can be produced only with oil colours. They also allow continuous over-painting, both in a wet and a dry state. Tempera painting, in which pure egg yolk usually takes the place of oil, is also highly suitable for over-painting, although it does not permit of the impasto technique to the same extent. Here the colour is often put on in many layers which extend from edge to edge of the picture. Tempera was always used in the fresco, the predecessor of oil painting. European painters used this technique until late in the 19th century. But most artists were no longer satisfied with the slow and gradual growth of a work from a rough ground to the final over-all colour layer. They liked to finish one area of a picture complete with detail, before proceeding to the next.
This alla prima technique is very suitable for water colours. Although water colours can be applied in layers and so produce what is known as a gouache, pure water colour is best used very thinly. The colour lets the light penetrate it, so that the white of the paper shines through. Since there is no white in water colour, the virgin paper must take its place wherever there are to be light effects. A tinted paper can be used to obtain a 'tonal' effect such as has already been described for oil painting. Using a damp paper causes the colours to merge and the outlines to disappear, and delightful effects can be obtained in this way.
The fact that the white of the paper is used in water-colour painting gives it a certain kinship with drawing. It is for this reason that museums usually keep water colours and drawings in the same department, though this does not seem altogether justified, since a pure water colour differs greatly from a drawing. It does not even permit a preliminary pencil outline as this could not be erased, but would remain visible beneath the colour. Water colour painting should therefore be regarded as an independent art form.
Every painted picture leads us into realms where the laws are quite different from those that govern sculpture. Sculpture and architecture have substance. They are what they seem, they occupy space; whereas a painting has a certain intangibility, whether it be a landscape, a still-life or a portrait. Only the dabs of colour are real; everything else is illusion. A painting is as unreal as a reflection in a mirror.
In order to give depth to their pictures painters use perspective. It was discovered in Italy about 1400 and can be arrived at by mathematical means (converging lines). But it can also be produced by ranging colours. Brown tints in the foreground, green in the middle and blue at the back create a perspective which -- being based on colour -- is far more appropriate to pure painting. There are several other ways of conveying depth, such as the atmospheric perspective of the Chinese.
Modern art has discovered many other devices for creating the illusion of space, notably Cubism. It is not, after all, the function of painting to simulate at all costs space as we know it in nature, by means of an optical illusion. A public that seeks and admires such an effect in art is on the wrong track and is unlikely to discover the painter's real intention. Painting should aim rather at creating an ideal space, an archetypal space, that does not vitiate the quality of the plane. This idea cannot be expressed better than in the words of the German painter Max Beckmann: 'We must transfer the three-dimensional world of nature to the two-dimensional world of the canvas . . . To transform three dimensions into two is a magic experience for me. In those moments I obtain a brief glimpse of the fourth dimension for which I yearn with all my being.' This fourth dimension is neither illusion nor reality but stands half-way between, and can only be made manifest through art.
|
 |
RSS Feed XML Sitemap HTML Sitemap Contact Us Privacy Policy
