The evolution of oil painting in materials and techniques

Simply using oil as a painting medium was tried in Byzantine period. According to records, this kind of painting won't dry after being exposed to the hot sun for several months. 1200, the monk Theophil Ruziros wrote a paper on oil painting, a diversified art form, in which he introduced the use of linseed oil and Arabic resin. /kloc-at the end of 0/3, paintings similar to oil paintings appeared in the British Isles. /kloc-At the end of 0/4, two Dutch painters, the Van Ike brothers (Jan Van Ike and his brother Hubert Van Ike), discovered a simple way to paint with oil-soluble pigments and created pure oil paintings. Although art historians can't conclude that the Van Eyck brothers were the inventors of oil painting, at least they found an ideal formula of oil painting media on the basis of previous experiments. Many experts believe that their greatest achievement is to add natural resin to the oil to make the pen smooth and the vehicle dry quickly. Jan Van Ike's The Wedding of Anofini and his most famous work The Altar Painting of Ghent (now in St Buffon's Church in Ghent, Belgium) consist of 23 paintings. ) is considered to be an important work in the history of European oil painting development. The oil blending technology invented by Van Eyck brothers is said to use a kind of "white Bruges varnish" and linseed oil to paint, and use them to blend the pigments he used in Tampere's paintings, and it is found that the effect is very good. Some researchers think that "white Bruges varnish" is rectified turpentine, and now we are still diluting oil painting pigments with turpentine. It is said that Antonoueuo de Messina1430-1479, the earliest Italian painter who studied and mastered oil painting techniques, went to the Netherlands to learn the oil painting techniques of the Van Ike brothers and returned to Venice to teach the use of oil painting pigments. Since then, oil painting as an independent painting has become popular in continental Europe.

For hundreds of years, oil painting has been further developed and perfected through the inheritance and creation of painters of past dynasties.

The development of oil painting has experienced several periods: classical, modern and modern. Oil paintings in different periods are dominated by the artistic concepts and techniques of the times, showing different faces.

The historical conditions in the early stage of oil painting development laid the realistic tendency of classical oil painting. In the European Renaissance movement in the15th century, humanism thought criticized religion and produced a positive appeal to pay attention to social reality. In order to gradually get rid of the single creation with the theme of Christian classics, many famous painters began to observe and directly describe the people, scenery and things in their lives at that time, so that the works with religious themes contained obvious realistic secular factors, and some painters described real life more completely. Renaissance painters inherited the artistic concepts of Greece and Rome, that is, they not only paid attention to describing an event or fact in their works, but also revealed the cause and effect of the event or fact, so they formed artistic techniques that focused on conceiving typical plots and shaping typical images. At the same time, the painter also explored the application of anatomy and perspective in painting and the role of light and shade distribution in the picture, forming the scientific principle of modeling. The application of human anatomy makes the figure modeling in painting have realistic and accurate proportion, shape and structural relationship; The establishment of focus perspective makes painting form the depth space of illusion through composition, and the scenery in painting is the same as the instantaneous visual experience in reality; The shading method unifies the objects in the painting under the light emitted by a main light source, forming a clear hierarchy from near to far. The artistic theme of humanism and the idea of pursuing realism in other paintings cannot be perfected because of the limitation of tool materials, and the performance of oil painting tool materials is suitable for full expression. Therefore, after a long period of production, classical oil paintings have become highly realistic.

On the whole, classical oil painting is the result of the comprehensive application of various factors in oil painting language, but artists from different countries and different periods pay special attention to one or several factors on this basis, forming different styles. Italian painters in the Renaissance paid more attention to the use of light and shadow. The dark part of the scene in the painting is evenly shrouded in shadows, and the boundary between light and dark presents a soft transition, creating a concentrated and seamless effect. Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna in the Rock is a representative of this style. At the same time, the painter Nederland clearly describes all the details of the scene in his paintings, and the difference between the scenes is not the transition between light and shade. R. Kangping's three-leaf altar painting "Notice of Pregnancy" presents all indoor and outdoor scenes in detail. Titian of Italy is the 1 th painter who pays special attention to the expressive force of oil painting. He paints on a dark background, and often uses bright colors with similar lightness and slightly different tones to form a magnificent golden tone. The repeated overlapping of transparent pigments and distinct strokes make the color and form blend organically and create a texture effect.

17th century is a period of rapid development of European classical oil painting. According to the social background and national temperament of their lives, painters from different regions and countries have made different in-depth explorations on oil painting language. The types of oil painting are divided into historical painting, religious story painting, group portrait, personal portrait, landscape painting, still life painting, genre painting and so on. Oil painting techniques are also increasingly rich, forming schools in various countries and regions.

/kloc-some oil paintings in the 0/7th century emphasized the light sense of oil paintings, and used the contrast of cold and warm colors, light and dark intensity and thickness levels to create a light sense, forming a dramatic atmosphere of the picture. Italian painter Caravaggio broke the orderly and harmonious light perception effect in previous oil paintings. He strengthened the contrast between light and dark on the picture, and often used a large dark part of the background plane of the picture to set off the bright people in the foreground, which made people feel that the light in the painting was dazzling. El greco, a Spanish painter, described the landscape as mottled light and shadow. He did not model from the two sanctimonious angles of light and shade, but from the intermittent distribution of light and shade. The warmth and coldness of colors have also formed intermittent continuous changes. The pen is dignified, and the color layers penetrate each other in the extrusion, giving people a confusing effect, and some even filled with mysterious and uneasy atmosphere. The Dutch painter Rembrandt also regards the light sense in painting as a means to express people's mental state. In a large number of portraits he has made, the characters are shrouded in a large dark part, and only the important parts such as the face and hands that express expressions show bright brightness. In the dark, he created a multi-layered Bo Tu with steady colors, which made the dark appear profound, while in the bright, he used thick paintings and knife method to create a heavy sense of volume.

At the same time, the application of brush strokes has also been explored by many painters. Brush strokes are traces of oil painting pen's movement with pigments on canvas. In early oil paintings, the thickness of pigment layer in all parts of the whole picture was relatively consistent, and the brush strokes were even, with almost no brush strokes. /kloc-painters in the 0 th and 7 th centuries noticed that the movement of brush strokes is driven by the mood and emotional rhythm when creating, and painters can generate emotions to control the movement of brush strokes when painting. The lightness, heaviness, slowness and urgency of brush strokes not only make the created image vivid, but also make the brush strokes have artistic expression. Flanders painter P.P. Rubens used a large number of paintings dipped in thin and bright colors in many huge works, leaving free and unrestrained brushstrokes along the figure of the characters, which caused the strong momentum of the characters and the dramatic conflict of the stories. Hals, a Dutch painter, paints portraits with light and flexible brushstrokes, which makes the portraits full of vitality and complements his heroic and optimistic personality. Another Dutch painter, J Vermeer, is good at depicting people in the room with delicate and round strokes like pearls, which creates a quiet and warm atmosphere in the picture.

The development of oil painting has a new trend in the19th century, mainly the change of oil painting color. J. constable, an English painter, was the first one to sketch in the open air directly with oil painting, and gained a rich sense of color. He juxtaposes colors with tiny strokes in local areas, mixing them into more vivid color blocks, and the picture is much brighter than that of classical earthy tones. Complementary colors of colors-the principle that the colors of the two poles of a color wheel can improve each other's brightness and intensity when they are juxtaposed-were later recognized scientifically, but constable obtained the principle of complementary colors perceptibly by observing nature, and partially applied it in practice. His works inspired the French painter e delacroix. Delacroix led by romanticism, and created large-scale theme paintings according to historical events at that time. He applied the complementary color relationship more to the color expression of his own creation, and formed color contrast with positive strokes in many places of the picture, which enhanced the brightness and gorgeous feeling of color and formed a style that shocked the painting circle at that time. Many painters in barbizon school, France, sketched in different natural climatic conditions, and realized the relationship among light source color, inherent color and environmental color of scenery, as well as the great significance of color tone in reflecting time, environment and atmosphere, setting off artistic themes and forming artistic conception and emotional appeal of pictures. A large number of their landscape creations depict the natural wind, rain, morning, dusk and other specific color atmosphere.

On this basis, French impressionist painters made innovative contributions to the use of color. They absorbed the achievements of optics and dyeing chemistry and solved the color problem of oil painting with the principle of color-light mixing. Painters such as C. Monet and A. Sisley capture the instantaneous impression of the color given by the light changes on the surface of the external scene, and juxtapose the contrasting colors with the thick brushwork. They realized that the dark part or shadow is not the change of black shade, and changed the traditional practice of drawing the dark part with a harmonious single color, and juxtaposed the dark part and the shadow part with color points. Due to the function of visual physiology, the juxtaposed color points are transparent, tend to be cold and warm from a certain distance, and form a subtle transition. Impressionism played down the sense of volume of scenery and strengthened the color factor. Impressionism does not rely on light and shade and lines to form a sense of space distance, but on the principle of color light reflection, it uses the warmth and coldness of colors to form space. Impressionist works have never been so vivid, which also shows that color is both comprehensive and pure expression.

/kloc-in the 0/9th century, European oil painting schools with clear artistic ideas appeared. Although oil painting techniques are mainly embodied in artistic themes and contents, they also have their own characteristics. For example, neoclassicism pays attention to the rigor and solidity of image modeling in oil painting, which conforms to the modeling law of classical tradition; Romanticism revolves around the theme of tragedy, and strives to create the tension of the plot in the painting with color, brush strokes and moving lines in composition; Pre-Raphael School pays attention to the expression of characters' psychological emotions in paintings, and many pictures are composed of three colors: blue, purple and green. Although modern oil paintings are rich in appearance, they all have the overall characteristics of realism. They are: an oil painting is the unity of artistic forms, the main color tone unifies the colors of all parts of the picture, and the local colors form a harmonious relationship with each other in transition and gradual change, without isolated color blocks; Brush strokes are basically used to shape images, with limited exposure and unified in a long or short orderly tendency; The depicted objects are unified in the composition of the central focus, forming an isomorphic effect with the real field of vision.

Materials and tools

A painting with transparent vegetable oil mixed with pigments creates artistic images on materials such as cloth, paper and wooden boards. It originated and developed in Europe and became an important painting in the world in modern times. /kloc-before the 0/5th century, the egg-colored paintings in European paintings were the predecessors of oil paintings. While using the egg-colored painting method, many painters continue to look for more ideal blending agents. It is generally believed that/kloc-The Van Ike brothers, painters from the Netherlands at the beginning of the 5th century, were the founders of oil painting techniques. On the basis of previous attempts to dissolve pigments in oil, they used linseed oil and walnut oil as blending agents to paint, which made the painting smooth, the drying time of pigments on the screen moderate, and it was easy to cover and modify them many times in the painting process, forming rich color levels and glossiness. After drying, the coating has strong adhesion and is not easy to peel off and fade. They used new oil painting materials to create, which was very influential in the painting world at that time. Oil painting technology soon spread to other western European countries, especially Venice, Italy.

The role and strong plasticity of oil painting pigments are incomparable to other paintings, which makes oil painting have a rhythm and strength that can resonate with people's thoughts and feelings in perception. Under the action of brush strokes, modeling not only completes the task of modeling, but also directly affects the texture effect of the picture. Rembrandt and Rubens are both good at mastering and controlling texture, because texture directly conveys the psychological feelings of artists and affects the appeal of their works. The so-called reasonable expression of texture includes not only the imitation and reproduction of texture to the object texture, but also the description and expression of the overall artistic conception of the picture. In traditional realistic oil painting, the texture is very competent to reproduce the texture. The delicate and rough texture of an object can be imitated by the corresponding texture, but this is a very passive behavior. The truly beautiful texture is the texture that can express the rhythm of the picture and the artist's feelings and has a high degree of harmony and order. This kind of texture often goes beyond the limitation of texture, penetrates the spirit of the whole picture and the viewer's heart, and becomes the beauty divorced from the specific color layer. In this sense, it is abstract. In traditional oil painting, it is attached to real objects in turn and integrated into the overall atmosphere from small to large.

The limitations of oil painting tools and materials lead to the complexity of oil painting techniques. For centuries, artists have created a variety of oil painting techniques in practice, so that oil painting materials can give full play to the performance effect. The main techniques of oil painting are:

(1) transparent superposition method, that is, paint diluted with color oil is used for multi-level description without adding white. It is necessary to brush the next layer after each layer is dry. Because the color of each layer is relatively thin, it can vaguely reveal the color of the lower layer and form a subtle tone with the color of the upper layer. For example, painting a stable blue color on a crimson layer will produce a rich effect of blue in the purple, that is, cold in the middle and warm in the middle, which is often a tone that cannot be transferred on the palette. This painting method is suitable for expressing the texture and heavy feeling of objects, especially for vividly depicting the delicate color changes of human skin, making people feel that blood flows under the skin epidermis. Its shortcomings are narrow color gamut, meticulous production process and long time to complete the work, which is not easy to express the artist's current artistic creation feelings.

(2) Opaque superposition method, also called multi-layer coloring method. When painting, first draw a large figure with a single color, and then shape it with multiple colors. Dark parts are often painted thin, while middle tones and bright parts are painted thick layer by layer, or covered or left, forming color block contrast. Because of the different thickness, it shows the rich charm and texture of color. There is no strict difference between transparent and opaque paintings, and painters often use them comprehensively in one painting. When expressing objects in darkness or shadows, transparent masking color method can produce a stable and profound sense of volume and space; The rule of opaque color superposition is easy to shape the body outside the dark part and increase the saturation of the picture color. /kloc-before the 0/9th century, most painters used these two painting methods, which usually took a long time to make their works. Some have painted a layer and left it for a long time, and then painted it when the isochromatic layer is completely dry.

③ Opaque primary color method, also known as direct coloring method. That is to say, after the outline of the object is made on the canvas, the color laying is basically completed at one time by virtue of the color feeling of the object or the idea of the color of the picture, and the incorrect part is scraped off with a painting knife before the color adjustment is continued. In this painting method, each dip has thick pigment, high color saturation and clear brush strokes, which is easy to show vivid feelings when painting. /kloc-Many painters have adopted this painting method since the mid-9th century. In order to achieve the effect of full-color layer after one-time coloring, we must pay attention to the use of brushstrokes, that is, painting. Commonly used painting methods are divided into flat painting, loose painting and thick painting. Flat painting is to draw a large area of color with one-way strength and even strokes, which is suitable for shaping a static body in a stable and calm composition; Casual painting means that the brush strokes are loose and flexible according to the natural turning trend of the painted object; Thick coatings are all or part of the thick piles of pigments, some of which form color layers or blocks up to several millimeters, which make the pigments present interesting textures and enhance their image.

As an artistic language, oil painting contains many modeling factors such as color, light and shade, lines, texture, brushwork, texture, light, space, composition and so on. The function of oil painting technique is to reflect all modeling factors comprehensively or individually. The expression of oil painting materials fully provides the possibility of applying oil painting techniques on a two-dimensional basis. The production process of oil painting is a creative process in which artists consciously and skillfully master oil painting materials, choose and apply techniques that can express artistic ideas and form artistic images. Oil painting not only expresses the ideological content endowed by the artist, but also shows the unique language of oil painting. The development of oil painting has gone through several periods: classical, modern and modern. Oil paintings in different periods are dominated by the artistic concepts and techniques of the times, showing different faces.