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The History of Paper

Paper originated in China in about AD 105. It reached Central Asia by 751 and Baghdad by 793, and by the 14th century there were paper mills in a number of places in Europe. The invention of the printing press in about 1450 markedly increased the need 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.

Earlier than 1798, Nicholas-Louis Robert constructed the earliest paper-making machine. With a moving screen belt, paper was made one sheet at a time by dipping a frame or mould with a screen bottom into a vat of pulp. A few 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 have become highly mechanized, the basic process has remained essentially the same. First, the fibres are separated and wetted to produce the paper pulp, or stock. The pulp is then filtered on a woven screen to form a sheet of fibre, which is then 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 regarding grades and types of paper are decided by a number of factors: the kind of fibre being used; the manner in which pulp is prepared, 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 more substances to the pulp, the most commonly used being bleach or colouring and sizing, the latter to impede penetration by ink; by conditions under which the sheet is formed, including its weight; and by the physical or chemical treatment applied to the resulting sheet.

Although wood is the principal source of fibre for papermaking, rag fibres are still used for paper of maximum strength, durability, and permanence. Recycled wastepaper (including newsprint) and cardboard 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 made 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 visible 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

Before you can create the best artworks that capture your unique painting style, you should secure four essential art supplies that can help you express 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 inspire you to create your very own masterpiece.

Paintbrushes
Every painter needs a brush to convey a sensation to his or her audience. Start finding different kinds 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, look 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 variety 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 want 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 tactile 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 when it becomes too thick. You can also use it for cleaning your brushes and using special techniques such as glazing.

Artist’s canvas
When buying canvases, you usually have the option to purchase a stretched canvas or a canvas board. Stretched canvases are conveniently mounted on stretcher bars, that 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 have visualised by preserving them into an exceptional work of art.

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What is Abstract Art?

Abstract Art is a wide movement in American painting that came up in the late 40s and then become a popular trend in Western painting during the fifties. The top 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. Most of these artists worked, lived, or showed their work in New York City.

While it is the generally accepted designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the right description of the type of artworks created by these artists. In truth, the movement comprised several different painterly styles varying in both technical skill and quality of expression. Despite this, Abstract Expressionist paintings also possess some wider elements. They are fundamentally abstract — in effect, they show forms that are not drawn from the outer world.

They furthermore proffer open, spontaneous, and individual emotional expression, and they exercise vast freedom of technical skill and method to reach this result, with special importance placed on the manipulation of the changeable physical texture of paint to evoke expressive qualities (such as, sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They place the same emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive use of the paint in a method of artistic improvisation in the trend of the automatism of the Surrealists, with the same intent of expressing the influence of the creative unconscious in art. They display the conscious abandonment of conventionally structured composition taken by use of discrete and segregable aspects and their replacement with a single unified, unvaried area, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Last, the paintings fill big canvases to grant these aforementioned visual effects both monumentality and engrossing strength.

The leading Abstract Expressionists had two notable forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensualised biomorphic figures in a free, delicately linear and liquid paint process; and Hans Hofmann, who created dynamic and fully textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally composed artworks. An early special influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on the Western shores in the late thirties and early forties of a troupe of Surrealists and other European avant-garde artists arriving from the rise of the Nazi party Europe. These European artists quickly moved the native New York City painters and privileged for them a detailed understanding of the vanguard of European paintings. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally regarded as having begun with the artworks style by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning during the late forties and early fifties.

Keeping in mind the differentiation of style in the Abstract Expressionist movement, three common approaches can be located. The first was action painting which is indicated by a loose, quick, dynamic, or violent handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in applications largely dictated by chance, i.e. dripping or spilling the paint directly onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto the raw canvas creating layered and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning utilised extremely vigorous and expressive brushstrokes building richly coloured and textured images. Kline made use of dynamic, sweeping black strokes on a white canvas to build starkly monumental forms.

The middle area in Abstract Expressionism is displayed by numerous varied styles starting from the more lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes seen in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic pieces of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The last and least emotionally expressive ground was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters took large areas or dimensions of flat colour and weak diaphanous paint to achieve quiet, subtle, almost meditative outcomes. The premier colour-field painter was Rothko; the majority of his artworks consist of vast combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular blocks that tend to shimmer and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism made a special influence on both the American and European art scenes in the 1950s. Indeed, the movement denoted the shift of the creative centre of modern day painting from Paris to New York City during the postwar period. Throughout the period of the 1950s, the movement’s younger followers increasingly took to the direction of the colour-field painters. By the sixties, the movement’s young participants had commonly moved away from the high extremity of the expressiveness of the action painters.

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