In visual art, mixed media describes artwork in which more than one medium or material has been employed. [1] [2] Assemblages, collages, and sculpture are three common examples of art using different media. Materials used to create mixed media art include, but are not limited to, paint, cloth, paper, wood and found objects.[ citation needed ]
Mixed media art is distinguished from multimedia art which combines visual art with non-visual elements, such as recorded sound, literature, drama, dance, motion graphics, music, or interactivity. [3] [4]
The first modern artwork to be considered mixed media is Pablo Picasso's 1912 collage Still Life with Chair Caning,[ citation needed ] which used paper, cloth, paint and rope to create a pseudo-3D effect. The influence of movements like Cubism and Dada contributed to the mixed media's growth in popularity throughout the 20th century with artists like Henri Matisse, Joseph Cornell, Jean Dubuffet, and Ellsworth Kelly adopting it. This led to further innovations like installations in the late 20th century. [5] Mixed media continues to be a popular form for artists, with different forms like wet media and markings[ further explanation needed ] being explored. [6]
Mixed media art can be differentiated into distinct types, [7] some of which are:
Collage: This is an art form which involves combining different materials like ribbons, newspaper clippings, photographs etc. to create a new whole. While it was a sporadic practice in antiquity, it became a fundamental part of modern art in the early 20th century, due to the efforts of Braque and Picasso. [8]
Assemblage: This is a 3-dimensional variant of the collage with elements jutting in or out of a defined substrate, or an entirely 3-D arrangement of objects and/or sculptures. [9]
Found object art: These are objects that are found and used by artists and incorporated into artworks because of their perceived artistic value. It was popularized by the conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp. [10]
Altered books: This is a specific form where the artist will reuse a book by modifying/altering it physically for use in the work. This can involve physically cutting and pasting pages to change the contents of the book or using the materials of the book as contents for an art piece. [7]
Wet and Dry Media: Wet media consists of materials such as paints and inks that use some sort of liquidity in their usage or composition. [11] Dry materials (such as pencils, charcoal, and crayons) are lacking this inherent liquidity. [12] [13] Using wet and dry media in conjunction is considered mixed media for its combination of inherently differing media to create a finalized piece. [14]
Expansion is a mixed media sculpture by Paige Bradley which combined bronze and electricity. The Expansion sculpture is thought to be the first bronze sculpture to be illuminated from within. [15]
Still Life with Chair Caning: Picasso's piece depicts what can be seen as a table with a cut lemon, a knife, a napkin and a newspaper among other discernible objects. It is elliptical (with speculation that the work itself could be depicting a porthole) and uses a piece of rope to form its edge. Paper and cloth are used for the objects present on the table. [16]
Angel of Anarchy: Eileen Agar's 1937 sculpture is a modified bust of Joseph Bard, which was covered by paper and fur. When this was lost, she made a 1940 variation which shrouded and blinded the figure with feathers, beads and cloth creating an entirely different perspective on the sculpture. [17]
Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed technique, rather than a photographic reproduction of a visual artwork which would be printed using an electronic machine ; however, there is some cross-over between traditional and digital printmaking, including risograph.
New materials in 20th-century art were introduced to art making from the very beginning of the century. The introduction of new materials and heretofore non-art materials helped drive change in art during the 20th century. Traditional materials and techniques were not necessarily displaced in the 20th century. Rather, they functioned alongside innovations that came with the 20th century. Such mainstays as oil-on-canvas painting, and sculpting in traditional materials continued right through the 20th century into the 21st century. Furthermore, even "traditional" materials were greatly expanded in the course of the 20th century. The number of pigments available to artists has increased both in quantity and quality, by most reckoning. New formulations for traditional materials especially the commercial availability of acrylic paint have become widely used, introducing initial issues over their stability and longevity.
Surrealism in art, poetry, and literature uses numerous techniques and games to provide inspiration. Many of these are said to free imagination by producing a creative process free of conscious control. The importance of the unconscious as a source of inspiration is central to the nature of surrealism.
A found object, or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already have a non-art function. Pablo Picasso first publicly utilized the idea when he pasted a printed image of chair caning onto his painting titled Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). Marcel Duchamp is thought to have perfected the concept several years later when he made a series of ready-mades, consisting of completely unaltered everyday objects selected by Duchamp and designated as art. The most famous example is Fountain (1917), a standard urinal purchased from a hardware store and displayed on a pedestal, resting on its back. In its strictest sense the term "ready-made" is applied exclusively to works produced by Marcel Duchamp, who borrowed the term from the clothing industry while living in New York, and especially to works dating from 1913 to 1921.
Assemblage is an artistic form or medium usually created on a defined substrate that consists of three-dimensional elements projecting out of or from the substrate. It is similar to collage, a two-dimensional medium. It is part of the visual arts and it typically uses found objects, but is not limited to these materials.
Antoni Tàpies i Puig, 1st Marquess of Tàpies was a Spanish painter, sculptor and art theorist.
Lenore Tawney was an American artist working in fiber art, collage, assemblage, and drawing. She is considered to be a groundbreaking artist for the elevation of craft processes to fine art status, two communities which were previously mutually exclusive. Tawney was born and raised in an Irish-American family in Lorain, Ohio near Cleveland and later moved to Chicago to start her career. In the 1940's and 50's, she studied art at several different institutions and perfected her craft as a weaver. In 1957, she moved to New York where she maintained a highly successful career into the 1960's. In the 1970's Tawney focused increasingly on her spirituality, but continued to make work until her death.
Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven was a German-born avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada. She was considered one of the most controversial and radical women artists of the era.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the visual arts:
Painting is a visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface. The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used.
In art, appropriation is the use of pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to them. The use of appropriation has played a significant role in the history of the arts. In the visual arts, "to appropriate" means to properly adopt, borrow, recycle or sample aspects of human-made visual culture. Notable in this respect are the readymades of Marcel Duchamp.
Collage is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole.
Geoffrey Farmer is best known for extensive multimedia installations made of cut-out images which form collages.
Brion Nuda Rosch is an American visual artist. He is based in San Francisco, California.
Nancy Grossman is an American artist. Grossman is best known for her wood and leather sculptures of heads.
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, comics, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines, such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts, also involve aspects of the visual arts as well as arts of other types. Also included within the visual arts are the applied arts, such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design, and decorative art.
Modern sculpture is generally considered to have begun with the work of Auguste Rodin, who is seen as the progenitor of modern sculpture. While Rodin did not set out to rebel against the past, he created a new way of building his works. He "dissolved the hard outline of contemporary Neo-Greek academicism, and thereby created a vital synthesis of opacity and transparency, volume and void". Along with a few other artists in the late 19th century who experimented with new artistic visions in sculpture like Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin, Rodin invented a radical new approach in the creation of sculpture. Modern sculpture, along with all modern art, "arose as part of Western society's attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged during the nineteenth century".
Visual focus depth art s a form of mixed media collage that places an emphasis on the use of three-dimensional application to individual creations of single one-of-a-kind art pieces to emphasize individual meaning in the work. It is a derivative of assemblage, collage and decollage. The concept is similar to the basic mixed-media collage idea of building up various levels of the piece for emphasis. Known in this medium as projections, the artist tries in a variety of ways to create a visual image that causes the viewer to focus on certain areas of the art framework that would ordinarily be overlooked or relegated to the background rather than to randomly layer structure creating a whole image of the work.
Kashmiri papier-mâché is a handicraft of Kashmir that was brought by Muslim saint Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani from Persia in the 14th century to medieval India. It is based primarily on paper pulp, and is a richly decorated, colourful artifact; generally in the form of vases, bowls, or cups, boxes, trays, bases of lamps, and many other small objects. These are made in homes, and workshops, in Srinagar, and other parts of the Kashmir Valley, and are marketed primarily within India, although there is a significant international market. The product is protected under the Geographic Indication Act 1999 of Government of India, and was registered by the Controller General of Patents Designs and Trademarks during the period from April 2011 to March 2012 under the title "Kashmir Paper Machie".