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Painting Identity

  

Painting

 

I selected painting as a media and identity as a critical term to explore. Spanning four continents, Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia, and the Harvard Art Museums, I have selected six works to exemplify this media and at the same time, explore identity as a critical term. 


Painting as a medium dates back at least 20,000 years, to the striking stylized portrayals of animals painted in mineral pigments found in caves at Lascaux, France.  Painting, the practice of applying paint and other media to a surface, usually with a brush, spans all cultures and crosses many genres. Painting is both an action, and the result of the action -- the painting as an object.(1) The surfaces (or supports) for painting have evolved from cave walls to paper, wood, cloth, canvas, ceramics, and bodies. Earth and minerals, plant extracts, and modern synthetics are still used for pigments and mixed with a binder to make paint. A solvent is also a component of painting -- a solvent, or vehicle, controls the flow, viscosity, and application of the paint.(2) 


In fifteenth century Europe, linseed oil mixed with pigments produced a medium both flexible and durable, which sparked a proliferation of creativity in Western painting at the Renaissance and after. Painting occupies a privileged position in art, and painters use the medium of painting to convey subjects, ideas, emotion, history, people, and places, real and imagined. Artists use the power of paintings to connect with emotions, as well as convey and evoke psychological and spirituality in the human condition.

(1) Art Term Painting, Tate Museum, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/p/painting (accessed 10/4/2020).

(2) Painting, Lumen Introduction to Art Concepts: Fine Art and Media Technique https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-sac-artappreciation/chapter/reading-painting/ (accessed 10/4/2020).


Identity

Many painters (and artists writ large) use their work to express, explore, and question ideas about identity.(3) Identity is the way we see and express ourselves, and is bound up in individual, familial, cultural, and environmental factors that shape who you are, including where you live, your cultural background(s), sex, gender, class, religion, or political beliefs. People’s identities are not fixed, and can shift over time. 


Historian Philip Gleason asserts that identity as a term came to light in the 1950s through social science. The concept of identity became qualified by specific designations and movements in the 1960s (Black power, feminism, gay liberation), which birthed identity-based political movements that had impact on art history.(4) 


My selection of paintings demonstrate a range of brushwork, color stories, cultures, and approaches to portraiture. Each painter is exploring personal or cultural identity through signs, symbols, composition, and technique.


(3) Investigating Identity, MoMALearning, https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/investigating-identity/#:~:text=Identity%20is%20the%20way%20we,role%20in%20defining%20one's%20identity.&text=Many%20artists%20use%20their%20work,and%20question%20ideas%20about%20identity (accessed 10/5/2020).

(4) Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, Eds. Critical Terms for Art History (Chiago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) pp. 345-346.

 

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890)

Self-Portrait Dedicated to Paul Gaugin, 1888

Oil on canvas

Unframed: 24 3/16 x 19 13/16 inches

Framed: 35 9/16 x 31 3/8 x 3 1/4 inches

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest from the Collection of Maurice Wertheim, Class of 1906 [HAM Cat. No. 1951.65]

  

Untitled, 2008

Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955)

Acrylic on PVC panel

72 ¾ x 61 ¼ inches

Museum purchase, 2008 [HAM Cat. No. 2008.233]

 



 

Figure, 1820s

Haida artist

Pacific Northwest Coast, probably Southeastern Alaska

Wood, paint, and human hair

7 1/2 x 3 1/8 x 2 3/8 in.

99-12-10/53093 (PMAE)



Henry Inman (1801-1846) after Charles Bird King after J.G. Lewis

Kit-chee-waa-be-shas (The Good Martin). Ojibwa Chief, 1832-1836

Object Description: "Kit-chee-waa-be-shas (The Good Martin)." Ojibwa Chief. 

Oil on canvas

30 3/8 x 25 3/16 inches

Gift of the Heirs of E. P. Tileston and Amor Hollingsworth, 1882,  Heirs of E. P. Tileston (1882), Heirs of Amor Hollingsworth (1882) [PMAE Cat. No. 82-51-10/28285]






Chinese artist

Album Leaf of an Ancestral Portrait, Qing Dynasty, 1644-1911

[Sketch pasted into an accordion fold book]

Ink and color on paper

Dimensions variable

Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Bequest of the Hofer [HAM

Cat. No. 1985.893.31]


Painted stela of Akhenatan, 18th dynasty reign of Akhenatan (1549/1550 to 1292 BC) (detail)

Egypt

Limestone and pigment

Dimensions unknown

1902.17.32 [HMANE]

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