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The History of Paper

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Paper has been traced to China in about AD 105. It reached Central Asia by 751 and Baghdad by 793, and then by the 14th century there were paper mills in several parts of Europe. The invention of the printing press in about 1450 markedly increased the demand for paper, and at the beginning of the 19th century wood and other vegetable pulps began to replace rags as the main source of fibre for papermaking.

Before 1798, Nicholas-Louis Robert invented the first paper-making machine. Using a moving screen belt, it was made one sheet at a time by the dipping of or mould with 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 are now highly mechanized, the basic process has remained mostly unchanged. Firstly, the fibres are separated and wetted to create the paper pulp, or stock. The pulp is then filtered on a woven screen to form a sheet of fibre, which is 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 among the grades and types of paper are determined by a number of factors: the type of fibre being used; the preparation of the pulp, which can be either by mechanical (groundwood) or chemical (primarily sulfite, soda, or sulfate) methods, or by a combination of both; by the addition of other substances to the pulp, the most common being bleach or colouring and sizing, the latter to check penetration by ink; by conditions under which the sheet is formed, including its weight; and by the physical or chemical treatments applied to the finished sheet.

Although wood has become the main source of fibre for papermaking, rag fibres are still used for paper of maximum strength, durability, and permanence. Recycled wastepaper (including newsprint) and paperboard are also important sources. Other fibres used include straw, bagasse (residue from crushed sugarcane), esparto, bamboo, flax, hemp, jute, and kenaf. Some paper, particularly specialty items, is created using 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 optical 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

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Before you can create the best artworks that show your unique painting style, you should secure four essential art supplies that can help you define your deepest feelings onto the canvas. Once you have obtained these important tools, you can already explore the world of art without anything holding you back. Here is a list of the most important supplies that can help you to create your very own masterpiece.

Paintbrushes
Every painter needs a brush to convey a feeling to his or her audience. Start finding different types of brushes that can assist you while you are exploring various painting techniques. Start with a flat synthetic brush to create simple works of art. As your skills continue to improve, search 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 spice 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 plenty of 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, and 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 can share the beautiful images you were able to visualise by preserving them into an exceptional work of art.

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What is Abstract Art?

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Abstract Art is a wide movement in American painting that showed up in the late 40s and turned into a dominant trend in Western painting throughout the fifties. The leading American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Contemporaries included 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. Many of those worked, lived, or had their work exhibited in New York City.

Although it is the generally accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the right label of the body of work created by those artists. In fact, the movement had numerous different painterly styles that changed in both skill and quality of method. Despite this vast area of difference, Abstract Expressionist paintings possess some wider characteristics. They are essentially abstract — meaning, they consist of forms that were not taken from the outer world.

They furthermore emphasize open, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they exercise vast freedom of technique and method to create this goal, with particular importance exerted on the use of the malleable physical nature of paint to create expressive qualities (like, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They display similar emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive use of that paint in a kind of psychic improvisation in the manner of the automatism of the Surrealists, with the similar intent of expressing the strength of the creative subconcious in art. They demonstrate the abandonment of regularly structured composition created out of discrete and segregable aspects and their replacement with a sole unified, unchanged grounds, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Finally, the paintings fill sizeable canvases to give such aforementioned visual signs both monumentality and engrossing power.

The first Abstract Expressionists had two particular forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensual biomorphic figures using a free, delicately linear and liquid paint process; and Hans Hofmann, who made use of dynamic and fully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally formed artworks. Another significant influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on US shores in the late 1930s and early 1940s of a group of Surrealists and important European avant-garde artists escaping the Nazi party in Europe. The avant-garde artists forcefully moved the native New York City painters and permitted them a more detailed understanding of the vanguard of European paintings. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is usually considered as having started with the artworks created by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

While acknowledging the variety of techniques of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three wide approaches can be found. The first was action painting which is recognised by a loose, rapidfire, dynamic, or forceful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in techniques partially dictated by chance, like dripping or spilling paint straight onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints on raw canvas building up multilayered and tangled skeins of paint into thrilling and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning used extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes building richly coloured and textured images. Kline utilised mighty, sweeping black strokes on white canvas to create starkly monumental forms.

The second area in Abstract Expressionism is exhibited by a host of varied styles going from the lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes of paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the more clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic artworks of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The final and least emotionally expressive field was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters made use of large areas or dimensions of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to achieve quiet, subtle, almost meditative works. The premier colour-field painter was Rothko; many of his artworks consist of vast combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular fields that tend to glimmer and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism cast a great impact on both the American and European art trends through the 50s. Indeed, the movement initiated the shift of the creative centre of contemporary painting from Paris to New York City through the postwar time. In the decade of the 1950s, the the movement’s youth increasingly followed the trend of the colour-field painters. By the sixties, the movement’s participants had largely shifted away from the heated expressiveness of the action painters.

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