What is Oil Painting?
Oil painting is a kind of art that is made on canvas, linen, cardboard, or wood with quick-drying vegetable oils (flaxseed oil, poppy oil, walnut oil) mixed with pigments. The thinner used in painting is volatile turpentine and dry linseed oil. The paint attached to the picture has a strong hardness, thus, when the picture is dried, it could maintain its gloss for a long time. Under the covering power and transparency of pigments, the objects depicted are fully represented with rich colors and a three-dimensional solid texture.
The Origin of Oil Painting
Oil painting originated from tempera in European paintings before the 15th century and was developed after Dutch painter Jan Van Eyck (1385-1441) who improved painting materials. Because of Jan Van Eyck's unique contribution to the development of skills in oil painting, he was known as the "father of oil painting." In the fifteenth century, Italian artists such as Piero Della Francesca (1410/20-1492), whose early work was primarily tempera, adapted to the new medium of oil painting. In Venice, Giovanni Bellini (C.1430-1516) began to exploit the depth and richness of oil paints. The development of oil painting experienced two periods–classical and modern. Oil painting in different periods was controlled by the artistic thoughts and techniques of the times, presenting different features.
Classical Oil Painting
Overall, classical oil painting resulted from the synthetical application of oil painting language and other factors. R.Campin's three-leaf altar painting "Conception Notification" meticulously presents all the scenes inside and outside. Italian artist Tiziano Vecelli was the first to emphasize the expressive force of oil painting artists by painting on a dark background. Transparent pigment multiple overlapping, which combines the technique of thick and thin and color, causes organic fusion which leads to a texture effect. The historical conditions in the early stage of oil painting established the realistic tendency of classical oil painting.
In the 15th century European Renaissance, due to the criticism of religion from humanism, contemporary works had to pay attention to social reality. Many famous painters began to observe and directly depict the characters, landscapes, and objects in life at that time to gradually eliminate the single Creation of Christian classics. The religious works contained obvious practical and secular factors. For example, The Annunciation painted by Leonardo Da Vinci was from Luke 1.26-39. It depicted the angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she would miraculously conceive and give birth to a son named Jesus and be called "The Son of God" and that her reign will never end. As a keen observer of nature, Leonardo painted the wings of angels as those of birds, and the marble table in front of Mary probably came from the tomb of Piero and Giovanni de Medici in The SAN Lorenzo Cathedral in Florence, which Verrocchio carved at the same time. Some painters demonstrated natural life scenes entirely. Renaissance painters inherited the Greek and Roman concept of art that focused not only on describing an event or fact but also on revealing its cause and effect.
Thus, in this period, the artistic techniques of constructing typical plots and shaping typical images came into being. At the same time, the painter also explored the application of anatomy, perspective in painting, and the role of the distribution of light and shade, forming the scientific principle of modeling.
Modern Oil Painting
In the 19th century, European oil painting emerged collectively with a clear artistic proposition, which was mainly reflected in the theme and content of art. However, their oil painting techniques also had distinct features. For example, neoclassicism paid attention to the rigor and solid sense of image modeling in oil painting, which accorded with the modeling rules of the classical tradition. Romanticism centered on the theme of tragedy to create the plot's tension in the painting with color, brushwork elements, and the moving lines in the composition. The pre-Raphaelite school paid attention to the expression of the psychological emotions of the characters in the paintings, and many pictures were composed with a sentimental and silent artistic conception in shades of blue, purple, and green. Although the features of modern oil painting had always been relatively rich, they consistently had the overall characteristics of realism, which were shown as follows:
An oil painting was the unity of art forms.
The leading tone of color was unified with the local color of the picture.
The local color forms a harmonious relationship with each other in the transition of gradual change.
In the 20th-century oil painting, different artistic concepts formed different schools and restricted the art form to present a variety of tendencies. Some aspects of the traditional oil painting techniques were often a form of artistic concepts that were strengthened and even pushed to the extreme. In addition, the formal language of oil painting was highly valued. For example, cubism ignored color and mainly made free construction of form. Brutalism emphasized balanced effects in intense colors. Expressionism distorted psychology through the disordered use of color and brushwork. Abstractionism was in which dots, lines, and planes of color constituted a picture. Western modern oil painting schools have been numerous and replaced in the past hundred years. As long as oil painting tools and materials were used as modeling media, artists could create arbitrary oil painting features.
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