Painting

On the eve of Glenn Brown's solo exhibition at Tate Liverpool, Rochelle Steiner and Alison Gingeras talk about the enduring appeal of the painter's work.

In the early nineteenth century a fashion for enormous paintings flourished, and artists including Martin, Benjamin Haydon and Francis Danby showed their huge pictures to an adoring public. These painters lived in a newly competitive age of showmanship and spectacle, typified by the panorama and diorama that flourished in the late Georgian and Regency period

What does it mean to be a painter today? Five artists who work with paint in varying ways and for different ends give us a glimpse into new possibilities for the medium

We take a quick skip through colour theory, and how some of modern art's giants have put it into practice 

In the second of our series on artists' techniques and processes, Susan Breen explains how the paintings conservation team breathed new life in to The North-West Passage by John Everett Millais

Acrylic paint is water-based fast-drying paint widely used by artists since the 1960s. It can be used thickly or thinly depending how much water is added to it

Oil paint is form of a slow-drying paint that consists of particles of pigment suspended in a drying oil that forms a tough, coloured film on exposure to air

Bitumen is a naturally-occurring, non-drying, tarry substance used in paint mixtures, especially to enrich the appearance of dark tones

Gouache is a type of water-soluble paint that, unlike watercolour, is opaque so the white of the paper surface does not show through

Canvas is a strong, woven cloth traditionally used by artists as a support (surface on which to paint)

A palette is a smooth, flat surface on which artists set out and mix their colours before painting, often designed to be held in the hand

Refers both to the medium and works of art made using the medium of watercolour – a water soluble paint with transparent properties

A diptych is an artwork consisting of two painted or carved panels

An artwork in three panels

Fresco is a mural painting technique that involves painting with water-based paint directly onto wet plaster so that the paint becomes an integral part of the plaster

The technique of painting with pigments bound in a water-soluble emulsion, such as water and egg yolk, or an oil-in-water emulsion such as oil and a whole egg

Airbrushing is a painting technique which uses an airbrush to give an even and consistent surface, often used to create a high level of realism

Impasto refers to an area of thick paint or texture, in a painting

Matter painting refers to the technique of using thick impasto paint into which other materials such as sand, mud, cement and shells have been added

Fumage is a technique in which an image is created by painting with smoke from a lighted candle into a ground of wet paint

Gestural is a term used to describe the application of paint in free sweeping gestures with a brush

Graffiti art as a term refers to images or text painted usually onto buildings, typically using spray paint

The term history painting was introduced in the seventeenth century to describe paintings with subject matter drawn from classical history and mythology, and the Bible – in the eighteenth century it was also used to refer to more recent historical subjects

Neoclassicism was a particularly pure form of classicism that emerged from about 1750

Theory developed by Edmund Burke in the mid eighteenth century, where he defined sublime art as art that refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation

Impressionism developed in France in the nineteenth century and is based on the practice of painting out of doors and spontaneously ‘on the spot’ rather than in a studio from sketches. Main impressionist subjects were landscapes and scenes of everyday life

The Pre-Raphaelites were a secret society of young artists (and one writer), founded in London in 1848. They were opposed to the Royal Academy’s promotion of the ideal as exemplified in the work of Raphael

The term action painters is applied to artists working from the 1940s until the early 1960s whose approach to painting emphasized the physical act of painting as an essential part of the finished work

Expressionism refers to art in which the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas

Name given by the artist Kazimir Malevich to the abstract art he developed from 1913 characterised by basic geometric forms, such as circles, squares, lines and rectangles, painted in a limited range of colours

Photorealism is a painting style that emerged in Europe and the USA in the late 1960s, characterised by its painstaking detail and precision

Abstract expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often characterised by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity

The term colour field painting is applied to the work of abstract painters working in the 1950s and 1960s characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour