What is it about a painting that allows us to differentiate one artist from another? How is it that we can distinguish a Cezanne, for example, from a Rembrandt? Part of it is the artist's selection of colors and their perspective on subject matter. But paintings are also unique because of the brush strokes used by the artist.
In this video, we're going to explore the development of brush strokes, and the masters that made them famous. We'll take a look at how the various strokes influenced artistic style as we trace their progression through history beginning with the Middle Ages. From the 5th century all the way to the start of the Renaissance in the 1300s, there was a limited variety of brush strokes available to artists because of the nature of the painting mediums that were popular at the time.
Back then, artists primarily worked in either fresco or egg tempera. Fresco and egg tempera limited artists'abilities primarily because of their fast drying time. A stroke of egg tempera can dry within five seconds, and that means that shortly after laying down a stroke of paint, it would dry and could then very easily leave a hard edge, which would create an obvious brush line.
Both paints are pretty much permanent as well. So they presented some challenges for artists. Because of these limitations, much of the artwork seen throughout the Middle Ages, which would include Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic art, has a similar look. So what brush strokes did fresco, egg tempera, and even watercolor artists use at that time?
In basic terms, there were three ways that they would apply the paint. One method was to apply strokes of paint next to one another in the hopes that they would remain wet long enough to blend before drying. They would typically paint in the direction of the form so that any visible lines would coordinate with the image. And an egg tempera, which had to be applied in very thin layers, a section painted this way, would be referred to as a glaze.
Glazing, which we see throughout history and in oil painting, is the slow buildup of thin layers of paint. Now, egg tempera and fresco painters could also use a hatching technique, or cross hatching. To do this, brush strokes are applied in rapid repetition in the same direction, and sometimes also at perpendicular angles, which is called cross hatching.
It's reported that Michelangelo used this technique when painting the Sistine Chapel frescoes. And finally, an artist could simply paint lines and shapes directly, called direct painting, intending them to stand alone, to communicate something such as a boundary of an eye. So when did oil painting come into use?
Well, prior to the start of the Renaissance, we find that artists did have some knowledge of oil paint. But it wasn't until Flemish painter Jan van Eyck perfected its use in the early 1400s that the medium started to gain recognition. It's important to keep in mind that most artists at this time had been trained in or worked with egg tempera or other water media paints. So initially, they used oil in the same way. In fact, today, experts sometimes have a hard time distinguishing whether paintings during this time of transition were painted in oil or egg tempera.
Oil paint stays wet much longer than the other paints. and has a denser, butterier consistency, making it remarkably easy to achieve smooth blends. Artists, especially the innovative ones like Van Eyck, must have been thrilled to discover that when they painted strokes side-by-side as they had with the egg tempera, they could now easily blend them together at a relaxed pace, producing virtually invisible brush strokes and resulting in beautifully smooth color. or value transitions.
This then made the effectiveness of glazing even more powerful when done in oil. The transition to oil as a primary painting medium was gradual through the first part of the Renaissance. Jan van Eyck was a critical part of this transitional time period.
The style he developed was characterized by incredible realism, minute detail, natural light, and brilliant color, all made possible through his ingenious use of oil paints. He had absolutely seamless brushwork. And his art appears so fresh as if they could have been painted yesterday.
Some of the artists during this time of transition would actually use both mediums in the same painting, including the ingenious Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci, who was quite an innovator, perfected a brush technique called sfamato, where the outlines of forms are softened and shadows painted so gently that the image conveys a soft, almost misty appearance referred to as Leonardo's smoke. He achieved it by painting multiple thin layers and making the changes in value very, very gradual.
It's one of the reasons his paintings had a very unique, life-like appearance. Around 1500, we see the artist Titian come into the public eye. Another incredibly important figure in art and someone that would inspire many future generations. Titian is really the first artist to show vigorous expressive brushwork, often called painterly brushwork, a style in which the artist doesn't care whether a stroke shows and in fact uses the lines of the individual stroke to impact the painting.
He would use his brush to dab, scrape, smooth, than scumble, a freedom of expression that would increase as he progressed in his career. He's also one of the first to use thick paint called impasto beyond emphasizing highlights. As we'll see, once you add impasto paint as a type of application, the thicker paint opens up the door to a wide variety of brushwork. Another dramatic step in the progression of brushwork is seen in the work of El Greco, who painted in the late 1500s.
He completely broke with tradition through his use of very thick paint, very unusual colors, and a distortion of his figures. El Greco looked at Titian's vigorous brushwork for inspiration, rather than the smooth techniques used by many of his contemporaries. and started allowing his brush or painting knife to express emotion. El Greco is one of the first artists to use a very stiff hog hair bristle brush, and he would use it to create textural brush lines.
You can tell when an artist uses hog hair bristles because unless they smooth it afterwards with a soft bristle brush, the bristle lines are visible in the paint. He's also one of the first artists to use an early version of a palette knife for painting. A close look at his artwork shows that both his brush or knife strokes are broken and he makes no real attempt to smooth the paint.
His contemporaries thought this was really crude, but today critics consider his work an early form of expressionism. Now if we compare El Greco's rough creative style with that of his contemporary Caravaggio, who also had an incredible impact on the painting. If we forget about their difference in subject matter and color palette, and just look strictly at the artist's style in their brushwork, you can see an amazing difference and you can see how the diametrically different brushwork impacts the piece.
They both had major impacts on future artists. Caravaggio's use of light his seamless glazes and his invisible brushwork would inspire artists like Velázquez, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, while El Greco's imaginative, expressive brushwork would inspire more modern artists like Manet, Cézanne, Picasso. As the use of oil became established, artists continued to discover the medium's capabilities. They began to see that they didn't need to be so rigid with their brush.
The paint gave them the opportunity to innovate, which is exactly what artists like Rubens, Velázquez, Howes, and Rembrandt would do throughout the Baroque period. These artists would also famously expand the use of impasto, using it to more interestingly portray fabrics, jewelry, and skin texture, while artists like Vermeer stuck to the traditional glazing methods. Peter Paul Rubens was an admirer of Titian's work, and his own work reflected that. He was known for his variety of brushwork, and is the first artist known to thin his paints with turpentine.
As he aged, his brushwork loosened and began to take on a kind of energy that later artists would incorporate into their own style. Both Spanish artist Diego Velazquez and Dutch artist Frans Hals would paint realistic portraits and figures, and would find ways to individualize their brushwork. Valesquez threw a feathered, kind of a dry brush technique, and Howells threw vivid, quick strokes and dabs.
In fact, Van Gogh said in a letter to his brother, what a joy it is to see Franz Howells. How different it is from the paintings, so many of them, where everything is carefully smoothed out in the same manner. Hals and Velázquez set the stage for Rembrandt, a later contemporary and one of the greatest of all Dutch painters.
His early work uses the thin, smooth glazes common to the period, but he became highly influenced by the variety of fluid, vigorous brushwork seen in the work of both Titian and Rubens. Velázquez, Hals, and Rembrandt, to me, represent an important step in the history of art. Not only do they masterfully combine thin and thick paint application methods, but they begin to popularize the single stroke expression, or bravura brushwork, which is basically bold, daring brushwork. In fact, Rembrandt is said to have done in one stroke what would have taken others five passes to accomplish.
Hals and Rembrandt were also the first great masters of what we call directional brush strokes. where the strokes are intentionally left visible and are painted in a direction or with a certain motion in order to convey an object or an aspect of the painting. Now around this same time period, landscape painting began to take a prominent role in art.
Jacob van Ruisdael, one of the greatest Dutch landscape painters, developed new methods of applying paint in order to better communicate aspects of a landscape. He picks up on the idea of using impasto paint to emphasize texture in nature. John Constable, who was popular in the early 1800s, was distinctly influenced by the work of Ruisdael, but he felt that landscapes should represent what you see, not the idealized version that was seen in the Baroque period.
Constable painted oil studies on location in order to better reflect realism. What's interesting is his work in these studies is very similar to what we'll see in the work of some of the post-impressionists at the end of that century. He developed lively, free brush techniques in order to capture the quickly changing elements of nature.
This freedom initially resembled the style of Royce Dale. But as his career progressed, his self-expression did as well. He took the use of impasto even further than Royce Dale had.
whether using a brush or a palette knife, and he would fleck on little bits of off-white paint to add texture to his water and skies, which proved to be a slight irritation to his contemporaries and critics. You could almost call some of Constable's work messy due to the incredible amount of textural brushwork that he has in some of his paintings. It's not until you see it from a distance that it pulls together to convey reality.
And of note, towards the end of his career, he picked up watercolor as a painting medium and employed some of the same brush strokes and his vision of nature to that medium, including using washes of color in the scumbling. One of Constable's contemporaries was J.M.W. Turner, who was also very innovative, especially in the portrayal of light and atmosphere. Turner worked in both watercolor and oil paints. Because of his work with watercolor and He was considered one of the greatest watercolorists of his time. He had an additional knowledge of transparency and the benefits of using white surface.
Turner increasingly used less detail in his work as he advanced in his career. His methods of application included thin transparent glazes, soft scumbling, impasto paint, and palette knife work. But he also used directional brush strokes to the extreme, producing an intense sense of drama in his work. Turner had a major influence on the Impressionists who were to come shortly after, including Claude Monet, who discovered Turner's work on a trip to England.