The Language of a Masterpiece: The Physical Techniques
The terms you need to know
There’s a point when looking at paintings where you stop thinking about what you’re seeing and start noticing how it was made.
The surface begins to matter just as much as the image itself, and then the work feels less like a finished object and more like a record of decisions; around tools, control, pressure, and time.
In this final part of our series, we turn to the physical language of painting itself; the ways artists use their tools and skills to build, layer, and shape paint into form.
Because beyond subject matter or composition, there is always the question of how something came into being, and what that process has left behind for us to admire.
Here is the rest of this four-part series:
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Medium
When we talk about art, one word you’ll hear quite often is medium.
In its broadest sense, a medium refers to the type of art being created. Is it a painting, a sculpture, a drawing, or a print? These are all considered different media and describe the general category to which an artwork belongs.
But medium can also refer to the materials used to create these pieces. For example, a painting can be made using oil paint, or acrylic, or watercolor, and a sculpture can be made in marble, or alloy of bronze. And so the word medium tells us both what kind of art we are looking at and what it is physically made from.
This term evolved in the 20th century with the works of Marcel Duchamp, who believed that art could be made from almost any material imaginable, found or created, and so the category of medium grew.
Some works combined several materials at once, which gave rise to the term mixed media used to describe artworks created from a variety of different materials rather than a single one.
Artists began incorporating ready-made/found objects, and even their bodies.
Assemblage (three-dimensional mixed media), installation, and performance, for example, are three-dimensional practices that are quite different from traditional sculptures or paintings but are now considered artistic media in their own right.
Diptych/Triptych
Sometimes a painting is not contained within a single surface, but rather multiple panels that are joined or presented beside one another.
The words themselves come from Greek: di- meaning two, and tri- meaning three, combined with ptyche, meaning “fold.”
Historically, these panels were often physically connected with hinges. In medieval Europe, this allowed the artwork to be folded closed, which protected the painted surfaces inside when it was not being viewed.
An example of this is the Wilton Diptych, created in the late 14th century. It’s covered in luminous blues and lavish gold paint. It’s a remarkably well-preserved piece, so much so that it’s actually astonishing to think it is over 600 years old.
