Painting… What’s it all about?

  “Cave painting of aurochs”

Painting by definition in Wikipedia is paint/pigment and color applied on canvas, glass, paper, wood, etc. with a paint brush, sponges, paint knives, or airbrushes.  Painting is an art medium that is used by an artist to express themselves through paint and color. Also, composition, line and abstraction along with the seven elements of art are used in paintings. Paintings can be naturalistic, landscape, representational, imaginary, or abstract.

Paintings and drawings are the oldest known art form used visually. Ceramics and sculpture, I think would be considered oldest art forms used in physical form or 3- Dimensions due to ancient bowls, cups, weapons, idols, etc. made in ancient times.  However, on 2-Dimension plane, paintings/drawings would be the oldest art work made on any given surface, such as stone or tapestry in ancient times. What years are we talking about? Some 32,000 years ago a painting was found in a cave in France called, “Cave painting of aurochs” known to be the oldest painting. It shows red ochre and black pigment engraved on a rock wall in the forms of rhinos, horses, and buffalos. However, later discoveries found rock fragments in caves or rock-shelters in Western Australia of paintings to be 40,000 years old.

Why I mention painting being the oldest medium used in art is because we need to know the history of art to know where we are going with it. Throughout history, art is used to represent what the artists viewed at that time in history. Just like the cave painting, it showed us what life was like for those people back then. I wonder what people would view us as 20 years from now. Art/paintings have changed so much since then and paintings have become more intriguing and advanced just as our generation has. I heard that more paintings are done on computer with graphic design or vector photo shop, etc… It’s because our generation is all about technology, yet I still feel we need to not let go of our old tradition ways of painting/drawings techniques.

As artists, we grow with the times and view things differently while using our medium to represent our time, space, and importance. What does the artist today want to say to the world? Is it all about us personally or do we want to say something to the people of the future world on how we lived in our time?