Painting

Painting is the practice of applying pigment to a surface, most often with a brush but also with palette knives, sponges or airbrushes, to create an image or expressive arrangement of color and form. The earliest known paintings survive as cave art from the Upper Paleolithic period, roughly 40,000 to 10,000 years ago, with sites such as Chauvet Cave and Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain preserving figures of animals, human handprints and geometric signs made with red ochre and black pigments derived from iron oxide, manganese dioxide and charcoal. Experts attribute the work at Altamira to Homo sapiens working in multiple stages between about 36,000 and 15,000 years ago. Over millennia the support for painting shifted from cave and rock walls to plastered building walls and eventually to portable surfaces such as panel, paper and canvas, while pigment sources expanded from earth and mineral colors to plant extracts and, much later, synthetic dyes. A decisive technical turning point came in fifteenth century Europe, when artists began binding pigment in linseed oil, producing a flexible and durable medium credited with helping drive the outpouring of creativity in Renaissance painting. Subject matter broadened far beyond the animal imagery of the earliest work to include portraiture, religious and historical narrative, landscape and scenes of everyday life, and painting has remained one of the most continuously practiced art forms across nearly every world culture from prehistory to the present.