Oil painting is a painting method involving the procedure of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on canvas, wood panel or copper for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest of the world. The advantages of oil for painting images include "greater flexibility, richer and denser colour, the use of layers, and a wider range from light to dark". But the process is slower, especially when one layer of paint needs to be allowed to dry before another is applied.
Mark Rothko, was an American abstract painter. He is best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular regions of color, which he produced from 1949 to 1970. Although Rothko did not personally subscribe to any one school, he is associated with the American abstract expressionism movement of modern art.
Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the immediate aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depression and Mexican muralists. The term was first applied to American art in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates. Key figures in the New York School, which was the center of this movement, included such artists as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Norman Lewis, Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell and Theodoros Stamos among others.
Barnett Newman was an American artist. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense of place that viewers experience with art and incorporate the simplest forms to emphasize this feeling.
Monochromatic painting has played a significant role in modern and contemporary Western visual art, originating with the early 20th-century European avant-gardes. Artists have explored the non-representational potential of a single color, investigating shifts in value, diversity of texture, and formal nuances as a means of emotional expression, visual investigation into the inherent properties of painting, as well as a starting point for conceptual works. Ranging from geometric abstraction in a variety of mediums to non-representational gestural painting, monochromatic works continue to be an important influence in contemporary art.
Grey or gray is an intermediate color between black and white. It is a neutral or achromatic color, meaning that it has no chroma and therefore no hue. It is the color of a cloud-covered sky, of ash, and of lead.
Morris Louis Bernstein, known professionally as Morris Louis, was an American painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. While living in Washington, D.C., Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters, formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.
Color field painting is a style of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the 1940s and 1950s. It was inspired by European modernism and closely related to abstract expressionism, while many of its notable early proponents were among the pioneering abstract expressionists. Color field is characterized primarily by large fields of flat, solid color spread across or stained into the canvas creating areas of unbroken surface and a flat picture plane. The movement places less emphasis on gesture, brushstrokes and action in favor of an overall consistency of form and process. In color field painting "color is freed from objective context and becomes the subject in itself."
Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
The Old Guitarist is an oil painting by Pablo Picasso, which he created in late 1903 and early 1904. It depicts an elderly musician, a haggard man with threadbare clothing, who is hunched over his guitar while playing in the streets of Barcelona, Spain. It is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection.
Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian, was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He was one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements.
The Red Studio is an oil on canvas painting by French artist Henri Matisse from 1911. It is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
The Monk by the Sea is an oil painting by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. It was painted between 1808 and 1810 in Dresden and was first shown together with the painting The Abbey in the Oakwood in the Berlin Academy exhibition of 1810. On Friedrich's request The Monk by the Sea was hung above The Abbey in the Oakwood. After the exhibition, both pictures were bought by king Frederick Wilhelm III for his collection. Today, the paintings hang side by side in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Mont Sainte-Victoire is a series of oil paintings by French artist Paul Cézanne, depicting the French mountain Montagne Sainte-Victoire.
No. 61 is a 1953 painting by the Russian-American Abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko. The work was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1961 but is now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Similar to Rothko's other works from this period, No. 61 consists of large expanses of color with dark shades. Rust and Blue was a part of the Color Field movement. Rust and Blue also uses layered coloring. Rothko described this as "inner light". Rothko painted in such a way that at times paint can be seen flowing upward across the surface.
Self Portrait is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch artist Rembrandt. Painted in 1652, it is one of more than 40 painted self-portraits by Rembrandt, and was the first he had painted since 1645. In composition it is different from his previous self-portraits, depicting the painter in a direct frontal pose, hands on his hips, and with an air of self-confidence. It was painted the year that his financial difficulties began, and breaks with the sumptuous finery he had worn in previous self-portraits. Art historian Christopher White has called it "one of the most magisterial and sombre of these (late) pictures". It is in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.
Big Painting No. 6 is a 1965 oil and Magna on canvas painting by Roy Lichtenstein. Measuring 235 cm × 330 cm, it is part of the Brushstrokes series of artworks that includes several paintings and sculptures whose subject is the actions made with a house-painter's brush. It set a record auction price for a painting by a living American artist when it sold for $75,000 in 1970. The painting is in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen collection.
Cynthia Knott is a painter known for her horiztonally-oriented seascapes which recall the "multiforms" of Mark Rothko and the later work of J. M. W. Turner.
The Blue Room is a 1901 oil on canvas painting by Pablo Picasso, which he painted during his Blue Period. It depicts a scene of a nude woman bending over in a bath tub. A hidden painting was revealed beneath the surface by x-ray images and infra-red scans, showing a portrait of a bearded man. The painting has been housed in The Phillips Collection, in Washington D.C. since 1927.
No. 3/No. 13 is a 1949 oil on canvas painting of American artist Mark Rothko created in 1949. The painting is composed of symmetrical rectangular blocks of magenta, black and green colors on orange background. No.3/No.13 was also influenced by the loss of Rothko's mother, who died in October 1948. It is held at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
