Day 3 Prompt: Painting
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tolkienekphrasisweekMandatory Art Form Prompt
Day 3's theme is painting. While painting can refer to an action, today's prompt is about what results: colored pigments like paint or ink applied to a matrix like canvas, wood, silk, paper, lacquer, metal, stone, clay, plaster… Paintings are dizzyingly diverse works of art in medium and subject matter. Figurative or abstract, miniature or monumental, free-standing in frames or applied as frescoes to walls, chock-full of symbolism or meant to capture beauty for beauty's sake, paintings encourage you to think of other worlds, confrontation, microcosms, color, and illusion.
Optional Writing Method Theme
Day 3's optional way to spice up your writing is mock-academic style. Do you think Hobbits write detailed guides for how to restore oil paintings -- such nice mathoms? Have Númenorean theologians written impassioned screeds on the religious symbolism of which sort of seabird Elwing appears as in the frescoes of the Royal Gallery? Do the Noldor care a ton about the history of linear perspective? Let your inner expert fly free!
Optional Art Method Theme
Day 3's suggestion for those committing visual art is showing your process. Just as we are fascinated by the cartoons, dessins, and sketches the Old Masters used to plan and practice for their great works on panel and canvas, we would love to see the steps of your artistic process! How do you prepare? Do you create multiple drafts? Do you enjoy a cool time-lapse? We want to see it!
Optional Pain Theme
If you want to make it sad on Day 3, consider the fact of lost authorship. For every Rubens who finagled their way into art history, there is a "from the workshop of" some other, more famous painter. Lost authorship might mean that a person who was once known was simply lost to the sands of time. It might mean anonymity never uncovered or discovered - taken on because of fear, or repression, or the exigencies of the market. It might mean a pseudonym, the real author hidden underneath for so long they cannot be found again. It might mean the author never being recorded in the first place.
Optional Joy Theme
Having now made myself very sad, I will provide an option for some joy! Paintings travel; it's one of the wonderful things about them. Before the photograph, miniatures, illustrations, and engravings taken from paintings were some of the primary ways people learned about what distant places and people looked like, or saw works of art that lived in faraway countries. As such, they were a fantastic vehicle for cultural exchange, artistic syncretism, and communication across distances both physical and cultural. Today, consider focusing on how wonderful it can be to share art across the boundaries of space, language, and identity.
A number of examples for your inspiration.
Day 3's theme is painting. While painting can refer to an action, today's prompt is about what results: colored pigments like paint or ink applied to a matrix like canvas, wood, silk, paper, lacquer, metal, stone, clay, plaster… Paintings are dizzyingly diverse works of art in medium and subject matter. Figurative or abstract, miniature or monumental, free-standing in frames or applied as frescoes to walls, chock-full of symbolism or meant to capture beauty for beauty's sake, paintings encourage you to think of other worlds, confrontation, microcosms, color, and illusion.
Optional Writing Method Theme
Day 3's optional way to spice up your writing is mock-academic style. Do you think Hobbits write detailed guides for how to restore oil paintings -- such nice mathoms? Have Númenorean theologians written impassioned screeds on the religious symbolism of which sort of seabird Elwing appears as in the frescoes of the Royal Gallery? Do the Noldor care a ton about the history of linear perspective? Let your inner expert fly free!
Optional Art Method Theme
Day 3's suggestion for those committing visual art is showing your process. Just as we are fascinated by the cartoons, dessins, and sketches the Old Masters used to plan and practice for their great works on panel and canvas, we would love to see the steps of your artistic process! How do you prepare? Do you create multiple drafts? Do you enjoy a cool time-lapse? We want to see it!
Optional Pain Theme
If you want to make it sad on Day 3, consider the fact of lost authorship. For every Rubens who finagled their way into art history, there is a "from the workshop of" some other, more famous painter. Lost authorship might mean that a person who was once known was simply lost to the sands of time. It might mean anonymity never uncovered or discovered - taken on because of fear, or repression, or the exigencies of the market. It might mean a pseudonym, the real author hidden underneath for so long they cannot be found again. It might mean the author never being recorded in the first place.
Optional Joy Theme
Having now made myself very sad, I will provide an option for some joy! Paintings travel; it's one of the wonderful things about them. Before the photograph, miniatures, illustrations, and engravings taken from paintings were some of the primary ways people learned about what distant places and people looked like, or saw works of art that lived in faraway countries. As such, they were a fantastic vehicle for cultural exchange, artistic syncretism, and communication across distances both physical and cultural. Today, consider focusing on how wonderful it can be to share art across the boundaries of space, language, and identity.
A number of examples for your inspiration.
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