Whois & Analysis for paintingvalley.com

A still life (plural still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural (food, flowers, dead animals, plants, rocks, or shells) or man-made (drinking glasses, books, vases, jewelry, coins, pipes, and so on).

With origins in the Middle Ages and Ancient Graeco-Roman art, still-life painting emerged as a distinct genre and professional specialization in Western painting by the late 16th century, and has remained significant since then.

Still life gives the artist more freedom in the arrangement of elements within a composition than do paintings of other types of subjects such as landscape or portraiture.

Early still-life paintings, particularly before 1700, often contained religious and allegorical symbolism relating to the objects depicted.

Some modern still life breaks the two-dimensional barrier and employs three-dimensional mixed media, and uses found objects, photography, computer graphics, as well as video and sound.

Monochrome describes paintings, drawings, design, or photographs in one color or values of one color.

A monochromatic object or image reflects colors in shades of limited colors or hues.

Images using only shades of grey (with or without black or white) are called grayscale or black-and-white.

However, scientifically speaking, monochromatic light refers to visible light of a narrow band of wavelengths (see spectral color).

Abstract art uses a visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.

Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an attempt to reproduce an illusion of visible reality.

The arts of cultures other than the European had become accessible and showed alternative ways of describing visual experience to the artist.

By the end of the 19th century many artists felt a need to create a new kind of art which would encompass the fundamental changes taking place in technology, science and philosophy.

The sources from which individual artists drew their theoretical arguments were diverse, and reflected the social and intellectual preoccupations in all areas of Western culture at that time.

Color (American English) or colour (Commonwealth English) is the characteristic of human visual perception described through color categories, with names such as red, yellow, purple, or blue.

This perception of color derives from the stimulation of cone cells in the human eye by electromagnetic radiation in the spectrum of light.

Color categories and physical specifications of color are associated with objects through the wavelength of the light that is reflected from them.

This reflection is governed by the object's physical properties such as light absorption, emission spectra, etc.

Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era.

The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.

Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art.

A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic for the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art.

More recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or postmodern art.