Painting is a visual art , which is characterized by the practice of applying paint , pigment , color or other medium to a solid surface called "matrix" [ 1 ] or " support ". One who produces paintings is called a painter. In art , the term "painting" describes both the act and the result of the action the final work is called "a painting". The support for paintings includes such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer , pottery, leaf , copper and concrete , and the painting may incorporate multiple other materials, including sand, clay , paper, plaster , gold leaf , and even whole objects.
Painting is an important form of visual art , bringing in elements such as drawing , composition , gesture , narration , and abstraction. A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by religious art. Examples of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery , to Biblical scenes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling , to scenes from the life of Buddha or other images of Eastern religious origin.
The oldest known are more than 40,, years old art of the Upper Paleolithic and found in the caves in the district of Maros Sulawesi , Indonesia. The oldest are often constructed from hand stencils and simple geometric shapes.
This finding was recognized as "the oldest known depiction of storytelling and the earliest instance of figurative art in human history. In Western cultures, oil painting and watercolor painting have 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.
The invention of photography had a major impact on painting. In the decades after the first photograph was produced in , photographic processes improved and became more widely practiced, depriving painting of much of its historic purpose to provide an accurate record of the observable world. A series of art movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—notably Impressionism , Post-Impressionism , Fauvism , Expressionism , Cubism , and Dadaism —challenged the Renaissance view of the world.
