Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint or other materials to a surface, usually with a brush, and more broadly it is one of the fundamental visual arts and its result — the picture. Painting works with colour, tone, line, texture and composition to create images of the real world, to express emotion or to embody abstract ideas. The supporting surface may be canvas, a wooden panel, paper, plaster or a wall, and among its techniques are oil, tempera, watercolour, gouache, acrylic, fresco and encaustic. The history of painting reaches back to prehistoric cave art and continues through Egyptian, classical and medieval art, the flowering of the Renaissance, the Baroque and on to modernism, which radically rethought the very notion of the image. In the twentieth century abstraction, expressionism and conceptualism expanded the limits of what a picture could be. The Ukrainian tradition of painting embraces Byzantine-Rus icon painting, Cossack Baroque, realism and the powerful avant-garde of the early twentieth century, represented by masters of Boichukism and non-objective painting. Despite the rise of photography and new media, painting remains a central and living art form.