![]() Locally, watercolour artist Debra Tate-Sears’ images of our regional limestone architecture will amaze you - and you can often see her artwork at Kingston Frameworks on Princess Street. ![]() Painterly trickery of this nature is called “trompe l’oeil.” which means literally “trick the eye,” and it, too, has been practised for centuries. Our eyes are fooled into making us believe that what we are seeing is real. Visual, or simulated, texture can also be found in sculpture (check out the Baroque artist Bernini’s marble sculptures, for example), but is most often seen in highly realistic paintings. In the example accompanying this column, the artist represents the hairs of the sleeping dog, the smooth surface of the ceramic jug, the roughness of the bark on the bundle of twigs, and the intermingled texture of the woven reed basket, all with a very smooth application of paint. The surface of these paintings are smooth and glass-like, with barely a brushstroke visible, and yet an incredible amount of texture is simulated through the representation of fruit, flowers, leaves, paper, glass, metal, etc. One of the first types of this art to come to mind is 17th-century Dutch still-life painting. This is essentially simulated texture - the artist uses line, color, and other elements of art to create the illusion of various textures in two-dimensional drawings and paintings. You can also see this technique in paintings by Teresa Mrozicka at Studio 22 on Market Square here in Kingston, where the actual texture changes the tone of the painting by capturing light in different ways from different angles.Ī great deal of art that we look at utilizes what is called Visual Texture. He would sometimes also use actual texture to reflect light to achieve a dappled effect in his landscape paintings, rather than painting in highlights. Vincent van Gogh is one well-known painter who used impasto to create actual texture in his paintings for expressive effect, in his Sunflower paintings, for example. Artists have used impasto for centuries to impart texture and expressiveness to their paintings in ways that can’t be achieved by realistic painting alone. The building up of pigment such as oil or acrylic paint on the surface of a canvas or board, so that it creates actual texture, is called impasto. ![]() All art has actual texture, whether it is the cool, smooth surface of a polished stone sculpture or the rough surface of a canvas laden with pigment. You can feel actual texture with your fingers - an item is soft, rough, gritty, warm, cold, oily, and so forth. The most obvious one is Actual Texture, which is tactile. Happily, it’s usually not necessary to actually touch the art in order to examine it with respect to texture, because texture is both a concrete and abstract concept. Most of the time it is impressed upon us that we DO NOT TOUCH THE ARTWORK, unless specifically invited to do so. Interestingly, that definition provides both the touching or tactile sense of the word as well as its visual counterpart, which is critical when discussing texture in art. We all know what texture is - it’s the “quality of a surface or substance when felt or looked at” (to give the Oxford definition). Learn a few terms of that vocabulary and you have tools to begin accessing the wonderful, intriguing world of art. Well, as long as you know what you like you don’t have to be an expert to appreciate art - but you also have to recognize that art, like any specialized field, has a particular language and vocabulary that it uses to describe and explain itself. Perhaps it’s a fear that they won’t know what is “good” or “bad” (a loaded distinction, to be sure), or that they’ll just feel bewildered by all the different styles, subjects, techniques, etc. ![]() Something I hear fairly often when talking to people about art is that they don’t tend to go into galleries because they feel that they don’t know enough about art to appreciate it properly.
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