IRAN ART EXHIBITION: WHICH ONE DO YOU PREFER? PAINTING OR DRAWING?
One of the earliest known forms of artistic expressions, painting has been practiced by humans around the world for millennia, with evidence in the form of used ochre found in caves in Arnhem Land, Northern Australia, dating the practice to at least 60,000 years ago. More famous are the Grotte Chauvet cave paintings in Southern France, which consist of depictions of rhinoceroses, lions, buffalo, and mammoths, rendered in black and ochre. And yet, iconic as these images are, it is far from clear that they would fit today’s criteria of painting at all…
Indeed, throughout much of Western art history, the term painting has referred almost exclusively to oil painting on canvas or wooden boards, with works on paper or other supports most often classed as drawings, irrespective of the medium used. By this definition, ink paintings and watercolours were grouped with drawings, a classification still used in some circles today. Visitors to the recent Drawing Now fair in Paris may, for example, have been surprised to see a number of painted works, often watercolours, on show beside more traditional ‘drawings’. Indeed, though the fair was, as its name suggests, dedicated exclusively to the medium of drawing, organisers chose to define any work on paper as a drawing.
By contrast, traditional Eastern painting is usually rendered on paper or silk, rather than canvas. Amongst the oldest continuous artistic traditions in the world, traditional Chinese painting, known as guóhuà is more akin to the art of calligraphy than to Western painting, artists applying black or coloured ink to a paper or silk support using a brush. And yet, with such a rich history and tradition, to exclude such works from the category of painting on the basis that they use paper or silk would, in an increasingly globalised art world, be to take an unnecessarily West-centric view of the medium.
Instead of focusing on the support, others define a painting by the medium used. Indeed, most artworks that are commonly classed as paintings are created using pigment suspended in a liquid, whether it be oil, water, acrylic, or a mixture of solvents, as in the case of ink. By this definition, therefore, all that separates works in pastel from paintings is that one is a solid and the other liquid, since the type of pigment used in each is identical.
What is a Painting – Why is this Question difficult to Answer?
Nonetheless, before simply defining a painting as any work in which a liquid pigmented medium is applied to a surface, there are several notable exceptions to address. For one, whilst there are many works in ink that easily qualify as paintings, we should not neglect the long and important tradition of ink drawings. Though the divide between ink painting and drawing may not always be a clear one, the key difference between the two most often comes down to the use of line versus larger areas of colour or tone. Whereas ink paintings by Chinese literati painters such as Bada Shanren, feature not only lines, but areas covered by washes of ink, works such as van Gogh’s famous ink drawings consist solely of lines, albeit highly gestural ones.
And yet, with artists increasingly shedding the stylistic and formal constraints of old, whether by combining graphic and more painterly techniques, or, as in the case of artists such as Jean Buffet and Anselm Kiefer, by using a mixture of paint and other media, hard-and-fast criteria for what constitutes a painting become more and more elusive. Indeed, with so many factors to consider, from the support to the media, technique, or style used, the line between painting and other visual art forms is less clear than ever before, leaving today’s painters faced with a blank canvas, and the opportunity to reinvent an age-old medium.
IRAN ART EXHIBITION: The main difference between drawing and painting is that drawing focuses on lines and shapes, while painting focuses on colour and form.
Drawing and painting are two different visual art forms. Drawing is the art of representing an object or outlining a figure, plan or sketch by means of lines while painting is the practice of applying colour to a solid surface such as a paper or canvas. Sometimes, drawing can be the basis of a painting.
What is Drawing
Drawing is the art of representing an object or outlining a figure, plan or sketch by means of lines. A drawing can also refer to a picture made with a pencil, pen, or crayon rather than paint. Drawing uses various instruments like pencils, pen and ink, wax colour pencils, crayons, inked brushes, and charcoal and various surfaces such as paper, cardboard or canvas. Irrespective of the materials used, drawing produces an accurate representation of the visual world upon a plane surface. Even doodles, cartoons, technical drawings seen in fields like fashion design, architecture and interior design are considered as drawings.
Drawing mainly focuses on creating lines and shapes using a pencil, a pen or charcoal. They are usually made in a single colour, unlike paintings. Moreover, realistic drawings involve measurements and scales.
What is Painting
Painting is the practice of applying colour to a solid surface such as a paper or canvas. It is one of the oldest art forms. The colour pigments used in a painting can be in a wet form, like paint, or a dry form, like pastels. Artists can use different mediums for their paintings, such as watercolour, acrylic, oil, fresco, and tempera. The medium is usually applied to the solid surface with the use of a brush; some artists may also use other implements like sponges, knives and airbrushes. Moreover, paintings can be done on many types of surfaces, like paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, walls pottery, leaf, and concrete.
IRAN ART EXHIBITION: Paintings can be naturalistic and realistic (still life and landscape painting), abstract, narrative, photographic, emotive (as in Expressionism), symbolistic (as in Symbolist art), and/or political in nature (as in Artivism).
There are several basic components of a painting. We call them elements of a painting. These include colour, tone, lines, shapes, textures, and shape. Colour is perhaps the most important element in a painting. It sets the mood; for example, a painting can be warm and inviting, or dark and gloomy according to the colours used. Colours can be further broken into hue, intensity, and value. A good combination of elements results in a good painting.
Difference Between Drawing and Painting
Definition
Drawing is the art of representing an object or outlining a figure, plan or sketch by means of lines while painting is the practice of applying colour to a solid surface such as a paper or canvas.
Focus
Drawing focuses on lines and shapes while painting focuses on colour and form.
Colours
While drawings are usually done on one colour, paintings are made with a multitude of colours.
Media and Instruments
Drawing uses different instruments like pencils, pen and ink, wax colour pencils, crayons, inked brushes, and charcoal whereas paintings use different mediums like watercolour, acrylic, oil, fresco, and tempera.
Conclusion
IRAN ART EXHIBITION: In brief, drawing and painting are two different visual art forms. The main difference between drawing and painting is that drawing focuses on lines and shapes, while painting focuses on colour and form. Sometimes, drawing can be the basis of a painting.
