6 Painting Techniques That Don't Need a Brush
The youngest of the Mexican muralists in the "Big Three" (Diego Rivera, Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros), Siqueiros was the first to publicly renounce the brush, calling it "a tool of wood and bristles in the age of metal." Searching for new techniques suited to the new era, Siqueiros founded the Experimental Workshop in New York in 1936, where young artists such as Jackson Pollock dripped, poured, splattered and sprayed paint.
Although the workshop's lifespan came to an end, artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Yves Klein continued experimenting with unconventional techniques. So here we present six modern painting techniques.
Splattering and Dripping
In February 1956 — exactly twenty years after the Experimental Workshop was founded — Time magazine dubbed Pollock "Jack the Dripper." Yet although the artist is famous for splattering paint onto canvas, he was not the first to do so. Japanese Zen Buddhist painters were splashing ink as early as the 15th century, long before Pollock created his first work in the 1940s.
Even so, Pollock's technique and the results it produced captured the attention of the American public. Much of that popularity was driven by photographer Hans Namuth, who published footage showing the artist at work in his studio on Long Island. Laying canvases on the floor, Pollock brought metal rods, kitchen tools, towels and sticks into the process, even though they almost never touched the canvas directly. "It doesn't matter how the paint is put on, as long as something has been said," the artist once explained. "Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement."
Pouring
At the Experimental Workshop, Siqueiros also began pouring paint directly onto canvas. Using a technique of "accidental painting," he poured one colour on top of another so that on the surface of the painting they would merge into unexpected, swirling patterns.
Frankenthaler took things a step further, and in her 1952 work "Mountains and Sea" poured thinned paint in layers onto unprimed canvas. Rather than sitting on the surface, the paint soaked into the canvas and stained it. For artists of that era, when the avant-garde was exalting the flatness of the picture plane, this was a major breakthrough.
More recently, British artist Ian Davenport has poured paint onto canvas from syringes. In his abstractions, colours run down in stripes and blend together at the bottom of the painting.
Scraping
The technique of scraping paint is generally associated with the Dutch painter Willem de Kooning, who achieved the effect with a palette knife, and with the contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter, who often used a squeegee (similar to the tool used to wipe water droplets off glass, only much larger). "When you use a brush, you're in control," Richter once explained. "You dip the brush in paint and leave a mark... With a squeegee, you lose control."
Like Pollock, Richter inspired filmmaker Corinna Belz to take viewers behind the scenes. While making the documentary "Gerhard Richter Painting" (2011), Belz spent three years in the artist's studio, capturing him dragging paint across the canvas with a squeegee. The process appears to demand considerable physical effort, but in this way the painting also captures the movement of the whole body.
Painting with the Body
French artist Yves Klein, who introduced the series "Anthropometries," took the process of making art to another level. In Klein's performance (which now comes across as deeply sexist), models the artist himself called "living brushes" rolled around in his patented blue paint. They then pressed their bodies onto giant sheets of paper, leaving imprints. Behind them, Klein conducted a ten-piece orchestra playing a single note — the Monotone Silence Symphony, composed by the artist himself. The performance lasted 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence.
In the 1970s and 1980s, David Hammons also created a series of imprints of his own body — his response to the Vietnam War and the riots over civil rights for people of colour. Instead of a brush, Hammons typically used his own body, coating himself in grease or margarine and pressing himself against the desired surface. He then dusted it with pigment powder, which stuck to the grease and revealed the image.
Airbrush
"To avoid painterly brushstrokes and texture, I use tools such as razors, drills and airbrushes," explains painter Chuck Close. Airbrushes, once used for retouching photographs, use compressed air to spray paint onto a surface. The technique makes it possible to create smooth transitions that resemble photography.
Using this technique, the artist created a photorealistic portrait of his friend and fellow painter Mark Greenwold, titled "Mark" (1978–1979). Close chose the four primary colours used in printing — blue, red, yellow and black — and carefully airbrushed one layer after another. Although Close is perhaps the best-known artist to have taken up this industrial tool, other artists, such as Betty Tompkins, have also experimented with the airbrush.
Digital Painting
Pollock, Frankenthaler, Klein and Close created paintings without using brushes, but pop artist David Hockney paints without even using paint. The artist creates vivid landscapes en plein air on his iPad. "People from the village come to tease me, saying, we heard you started drawing on your phone," Hockney once admitted. "But no, I just sometimes talk on a sketchbook."
California-based artist Petra Cortright also creates digital paintings. Using Photoshop, she layers hundreds of images on top of one another. Naturally, the artist spends a great deal of time at a screen, but the videos showing the images being layered are themselves exhibited as works of art.
If Siqueiros was searching for modern painting techniques for the industrial age, then Hockney and Cortright have found painting tools for the digital age. Even having given up the brush, the canvas and paint itself, contemporary artists keep discovering new techniques that expand the boundaries of how we perceive painting.