The History of Paper
Paper has been traced to China in about AD 105. It reached Central Asia by 751 and Baghdad by 793, and by the 14th century there were paper mills in a number of places in Europe. The invention of the printing press in about 1450 greatly increased the need for paper, and at the beginning of the 19th century wood and other vegetable pulps began to replace rags as the principal source of fibre for papermaking.
Before 1798, Nicholas-Louis Robert invented the earliest paper-making machine. With a moving screen belt, it was made only one sheet at a time by the dipping of or mould which has a screen bottom into a vat of pulp. Several years later the brothers Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier improved Robert’s machine, and in 1809 John Dickinson invented the first cylinder machine.
Although almost all steps in papermaking have become highly mechanized, the basic process has remained mostly unchanged. First, the fibres are separated and wetted to produce the paper pulp, or stock. The pulp is then filtered on a woven screen to form a sheet of fibre, which is then pressed and compacted to squeeze out most of the water. The remaining water is removed by evaporation, and the dry sheet is further compressed and, depending upon the intended use, coated or impregnated with other substances.
Differences regarding grades and types of paper are decided by a number of factors: the type of fibre used; the manner in which pulp is prepared, either by mechanical (groundwood) or chemical (primarily sulfite, soda, or sulfate) methods, or by a combination of both; by the adding of more substances to the pulp, the most common being bleach or colouring and sizing, the latter to reduce penetration by ink; by conditions under which the sheet is formed, including its weight; and by the physical or chemical treatment applied to the resulting sheet.
Although wood is the main source of fibre for papermaking, rag fibres are still used for paper of maximum strength, resistance to mould, and permanence. Recycled wastepaper (including newsprint) and paperboard are also important sources. Still other fibres used include straw, bagasse (residue from crushed sugarcane), esparto, bamboo, flax, hemp, jute, and kenaf. Some paper, particularly specialty items, is created from synthetic fibres.
Weight or substance per unit area, called basis weight, is measured in reams (now commonly 500 sheets). Paper is also measured by caliper (thickness) and density. The strength and durability of paper is determined by factors such as the strength and length of the fibres, as well as their bonding ability, and the formation and structure of the sheet. The visible properties of paper include its brightness, colour, opacity, and gloss. Among the most important paper grades are bond, book, bristol, groundwood and newsprint, kraft, paperboard, and sanitary.
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Four Essential Art Supplies for Professional and Budding Painters
Before you can create the best artworks that reflect your unique painting style, you will need to secure four essential art supplies that can help you express your deepest feelings onto the canvas. Once you have obtained these important tools, you are ready to explore the world of art without any inhibitions or reservations. Here is a list of the necessary supplies that can inspire you to create your very own masterpiece.
Paintbrushes
Every painter needs a brush to convey a feeling to his or her audience. Start collecting different kinds of brushes that can help you while you are exploring different painting techniques. Start with a flat synthetic brush to create simple works of art. As your skills continue to improve, look for other art supplies such as flat bristle brushes, Filbert brushes, and sable brushes (and think outside of the box, trying items such as rubber wedges, potato/lino cut shapes}. All of these tools can add variety to every idea you were able to put into paintings.
Palettes and palette knives
While you are using oil-based paint, you will need to use a wood palette to hold them. Do not forget to clean your palette at the end of all your painting sessions. If you need to use acrylic paints, use a paper palette or any plastic surface instead of a wooden palette.
You can use palette knives to mix the paint on your wooden or paper palette. Try to look for trowel-shaped palette knives that you can use to remove the paint from your canvas or palette.
Oil paint and special mediums
Oil paint is one of the most common art supplies used for painting pictures with beautiful textures. Their versatile nature can help you use thin and thick textures for your artworks. Since they tend to dry slowly, you will have enough time to work the oil paint on the canvas and to scrape some of the paint off for revisions.
You will also need special mediums to thin the oil paint every time it becomes too thick. You can also use it for cleaning your brushes and using special techniques such as glazing.
Artist’s canvas
When purchasing canvases, you should have the option to purchase a stretched canvas or a canvas board. Stretched canvases are conveniently mounted on stretcher bars, that can be displayed on walls even when they are not framed.
If you have a limited budget, try using canvas boards as an alternative to high-end stretched canvases. Although they are cheaper than stretched canvases, they can deliver better performance with their durable card panels and versatile surfaces.
With these four key art supplies, you are ready share the beautiful images you were able to visualise by preserving them into a wonderful work of art.
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What is Abstract Art?
Abstract Art is a vast movement in American painting that started in the late 1940s and was a predominant trend in Western painting through the fifties. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Some others were Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov. Several of them worked, lived, or had galleries in New York City.
Despite the fact that it is the generally accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not a proper name of the kind of artworks created by those artists. In actual fact, the movement had numerous different painterly styles that differentiated in both skill and quality of form. Despite this differentiation, Abstract Expressionist paintings also share several broad traits. They are basically abstract — i.e., they display forms which are not drawn from the outer world.
They furthermore display unrestricted, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they exhibit considerable freedom of technical skill and procedure to attain this outcome, with a particular importance pushed on the exploitation of the changeable physical texture of paint to call up expressive qualities (such as, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They exhibit similar importance on the unstudied and intuitive application of the paint in a method of psychological improvisation in the trend of the automatism of the Surrealists, with the parallelable aim of finding the influence of the creative unconscious in art. They show the abandonment of normally structured composition found with discrete and segregable elements and their replacement with a single unified, unchanged grounds, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Finally, the paintings fill large canvases to allow the aforementioned visual signs both monumentality and engrossing strength.
The first Abstract Expressionists had two original forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted suggestive biomorphic images by using a free, delicately linear and liquid paint application; and Hans Hofmann, who made use of dynamic and harshly textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally formed works. Another early and significant influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on US shores in the late 1930s and early 1940s of a troupe of Surrealists and important European avant-garde artists fleeing the rise of the Nazis in Europe. Those avant-garde artists greatly influenced the native New York City painters and gave them a detailed insight of the vanguard of European paintings. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is now considered as having been initiated with the painting style by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in the late forties and early fifties.
While recognising the differentiation of styles in the Abstract Expressionist movement, three wide approaches can be seen. First was action painting which is indicated by a loose, rapid, dynamic, or powerful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in applications largely dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling paint straight onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto raw canvas to create layered and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning had especially vigorous and expressive brushstrokes to build up richly coloured and textured images. Kline utilised dynamic, sweeping black strokes onto white canvas creating starkly monumental forms.
The next approach within Abstract Expressionism is displayed by numerous varied styles starting from the lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes of paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic artworks of Motherwell and Gottlieb.
The last and least emotionally expressive ground was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters took large spaces or fields of flat colour and thin diaphanous paint to create quiet, subtle, almost meditative results. The leading colour-field painter was Rothko; the large part of his artworks consist of wide combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular spaces that tend to shine and resonate.
Abstract Expressionism created a special impact on both the American and European art trends throughout the 1950s. Indeed, the movement initiated the shift of the creative centre of contemporary painting from Paris to New York City during the postwar years. In the time of the fifties, the younger followers of the movement increasingly came to the direction of the colour-field painters. By the 60s, the movement’s practitioners had generally drifted away from the heated expressiveness of the action painters.
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