Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface (support base). In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting. Paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay or concrete. Paintings may be decorated with gold leaf, and some modern paintings incorporate other materials including sand, clay, and scraps of paper.

Painting is a mode of expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, composition or abstraction and other aesthetics may serve to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life or landscape painting), photographic, abstract, be loaded with narrative content, symbolism, emotion or be political in nature.

A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by spiritual motifs and ideas; examples of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to Biblical scenes rendered on the interior walls and ceiling of The Sistine Chapel, to scenes from the life of Buddha or other scenes of eastern religious origin.

History of Painting

The oldest known paintings are at the Grotte Chauvet in France, claimed by some historians to be about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, mammoth or humans often hunting. However the earliest evidence of painting has been discovered in two rock-shelters in Arnhem Land, in northern Australia. In the lowest layer of material at these sites there are used pieces of ochre estimated to be 60,000 years old. Archaeologists have also found a fragment of rock painting preserved in a limestone rock-shelter in the Kimberley region of North-Western Australia, that is dated 40 000 years old. There are examples of cave paintings all over the world—in France, Spain, Portugal, China, Australia, and India.

In Western cultures oil painting and watercolor painting are the best known media, with rich and complex traditions in style and subject matter. In the East, ink and color ink historically predominated the choice of media with equally rich and complex traditions.

Frederick Ronald (Fred) Williams OBE (23 January 1927 – 22 April 1982) was an Australian painter and printmaker. He was one of Australia’s most important artists, and one of the twentieth century’s major painters of the landscape. He had more than seventy solo exhibitions during his career in Australian galleries, as well as the exhibition Fred Williams – Landscapes of a Continent at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1977.

Fred Williams was born in 1927 in Melbourne. From 1943 to 1947 he studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, at first part-time and then full-time from 1945 at the age of 16. The Gallery School was traditional and academic, with a long and prestigious history. He also began lessons under George Bell the following year, who had his own art school in Melbourne. This continued until 1950. Bell was a conservative modern artist but a very influential teacher.

Between 1951 and 1956, Williams studied part-time at the Chelsea School of Art, London (now Chelsea College of Art and Design) and in 1954 he did an etching course at the Central School of Arts and Craft. He subsidised his art practice by working in a picture-framer’s shop. He returned to Melbourne in 1957.

He had work included in the ‘Recent Australian Painting’ exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and ‘Australian Painting: Colonial, Impressionism, Modern’ at the Tate Gallery.

He married Lyn Watson in 1960, and they had three daughters: Isobel, Louise and Kate. In 1963 the couple moved to Upwey, Victoria in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne, a location that would have a decisive impact on his work. In 1964 they travelled through Europe on a Helena Rubenstein Scholarship. In 1969 Williams moved to Hawthorn, an inner suburb of Melbourne.

In 1976 he was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and awarded a Doctorate of Law (Honoris Causa) by Monash University in 1980.

Williams won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting twice; in 1966 with Upwey Landscape and in 1976 with Mt. Kosciusko.

His painting Upwey Landscape (1965) sold for $1,987,700 in one of the final auctions of Christie’s in Australia in April 2006, which was the second highest price for an Australian work. The previous highest price for one of Williams’ paintings was $5,875,000 for You Yangs Landscape in 1963.

He died in 1982, in Hawthorn from lung cancer at age 55.

How do we decide what colours we mix to achieve the required colour. Do we do it by instinct, a bit of this colour, a little of that ? Here are some tips to help you put a little more science into the art of colour mixing.

Don’t Use More Than Three Colours in a Mixture. The more pigments you mix together, the muddier your colours will become. To keep your mixes looking fresh and clean use just two colours (You can add white if necessary).

Use a Key Colour in all Mixes. Add a small amount of the same colour to all your mixes. For example, try adding a small amount of burnt umber to all your mixes. Take this approach across the whole painting and you’ll create a painting with a keyed colour range. Each colour will therefore have a least a little in common with its neighbours and (hopefully) this will pull your painting together.

Use a Coloured Ground for your Painting. Before you start to paint, give your canvas a coat or a stain of another colour. This will affect your painting in two ways: Firstly, the underpainting will unify all the coloours you place on top. Secondly, as you add colours over the top, the colour underneath will inevitably show through and change the colour perceived by the viewer. For example, a light wash of viridian green and burnt sienna will give a dark leafy greenness to a forest scene.

Use a Limited Set of Colours. Try using a very limited palette of colours. Try using the earth colours (yellow ochre, olive green, venetian red, raw umber, burnt sienna, raw sienna) and maybe french ultramarine. You’ll be amazed at the range of colours you can achieve, but just as importantly, the colours you mix will be more ‘together’.

Use Complementary Colours Side-by-side. Complementary colours are ‘opposite’ colours. For example, the opposite or red is green, the opposite of blue is orange. Place two opposite colours next to each other on your canvas and the eye will perceive both colours as more intense. Don’t just think of this phenomenon in terms of bright, primary colours, try it in subtle tints and shades. For example, I recently contrasted a pale blue shirt against a white background by adding a little cadmium orange to the white mixture. The effect was to ‘lift’ the blue shirt slightly and move it away from the very slightly orangey background.

Mix Complementary Colours to Make Darks. Mix cadmium red with pthalo green to get a colour that is very near to black, but twice as interesting. Add white to get a beautiful grey. Or try mixing ultramarine with burnt umber to give a fantastic dark that can be warm (add more umber) or cool (add more ultramarine).

Use a Lighter Tone to Separate Two Colour Areas. A trick used by some artists is to slightly lighten the of a colour at the border with another. For example, look closely at ‘The Geographer’ by Vermeer. At the edge of the blue gown Vermeer adds a little white to the colour of the distant wardrobe. This has the effect of intensifying the blue colour and putting distance between the figure and his background, opening up a three dimensional space the brings the nearby figure into sharper relief.

Use warm and cool colours to introduce depth. The mantra is “warm colours advance and cool colours recede”. Its boring (and perhaps a cliché) but it does work!

Use complementary colours to model shapes. Rather than using shadow colours to suggest the gentle curve of someone’s cheek in a portrait, mix a little ultramarine or viridian green into the flesh colour mix. The effect will be more subtle.

Practice Your Colour Mixes. Don’t experiment with colour mixes on your best pictures, paint colour swatches instead. For example, mix pure ultramarine with pure viridian green and paint a stripe on a cheap, throwaway surface. Then add a little white to the mixture and paint another stripe next to the first. Gradually introduce more white into the mixture until the mixture is almost white.

Finally, Remember to Forget the Rules! Be prepared to forget everything you ever learnt about colours and colour mixing. Okay, so warm colours advance and cool colours recede? Try painting a sunset.