What is Screen Printing? Screen printing is a stencil-like printmaking technique developed in China and Japan many centuries ago. Screen printing, also known as serigraphy or silkscreen, only gained mainstream popularity as an artistic technique in the 1960s. To create a screen print, an image is exposed onto a screen coated in photo-emulsion, which is …
What is a Self-portrait? Self-portraiture is a sub-category of the artistic genre of portraiture. A self-portrait is a portrait of an artist realized by the artist himself or herself, mainly through the medium of painting, drawing, sculpture or photography. A self-portrait is hardly a mere form of recording one’s appearance: it involves very often the …
What is Sfumato? Sfumato is a visual art technique that creats softened, hazy effects with the natural gradation of colors, tones, and shadows, and eliminates lines and borders. Sfumato was used in both drawing and painting.The word Sfumato is taken from the Italian word “sfumare” meaning to tone down or evaporate like smoke. Famous Paintings …
What is Site-Specific Art? The term Site-Specific art is commonly used in the field of Contemporary Arts to indicate a type of artistic intervention specifically conceived for a precise location and that interacts with it. When designing a Site-Specific artwork, the artist pays particular attention to the spatial aspects of the chosen place. The work is usually created exclusively to …
What is Socialist Realism? Socialist realism is a form of modern realism that was the official state art in the Soviet Union and the countries under its influence from 1934 to the mid-1980s. In the visual arts, this direction brings a specific synthesis of communist propaganda with the traditions of realism, neoclassicism and romanticism. With …
What is Still Life? A still life is an artwork that typically depicts inanimate subject matter. Still life painting is one of the principal genres in Western art. Typically commonplace objects that are depicted in still life art include plants and flowers, food, books, and many other objects that communicate the intended message behind the …
Stone Age art, also called prehistoric art, was created between the period of 40,000 BCE to 3000 BCE ending with the Bronze Age. Global prehistory is a period called lithic or stone ages. Prehistoric art from the Stone Ages is divided into three segments: Paleolithic or Old Stone Age art, 40,000 BCE to 10,000 BCE; …
Suprematism is an Avant-garde artistic movement that Kasimir Malevich began to develop in 1913. The very term Suprematism refers to an artistic practice built on abstract forms characterized by “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” in relation to the representative mimetic artistic tradition. Notable representatives of this movement are Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, Alexandra Exter, …
What is Synthetic Cubism? Synthetic Cubism is the second phase of the Cubism art movement that lasted from 1912 to 1914, around the time of the first world war. Led by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Synthetic Cubism is characterised by flat depictions of everyday objects and bolder, more symbolic compositions than its antecedent, …
The term Synthetism, from the French verb synthétiser, refers to the Post-impressionist painting style of Paul Gauguin, Emile Bernard, Louis Anquetin, and the painters who gathered at Pont Aven in the late 1880s and early 1890s. This painting method was based on the synthesis of the subject matter and the artist’s experience of the subject. …
