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Painting taken literally is the practice of applying color to a surface (support) such as paper, canvas, wood, glass, or other. more...

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However, when used in an artistic sense, the term "painting" means the use of this activity in combination with drawing, composition and other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner.

What enables painting is the perception and representation of intensity. Every point in space has different intensity. The means of representing this intensity in painting is therefore the shade, nuance, i.e. the span between white and black with all visible gray shades - the difference in intensity. Line is considered as reduced surface, the difference in surface intensity (int. of reflected light) is marked by thickness of line. In practice, only by use of shades painter can articulate shapes - if the two meeting surfaces are of very different intensity, the line will be thick, if the surfaces are close in intensity, the line will be pale. Color and texture are separate qualities, and they can not be used to articulate form, but can be mixed (for instance with gray) without restriction. By using just color (of the same intensity) one can only represent symbolic shapes, and not 3D space or construction of an object. It is important to distinguish between using this basic painting means and ideological means, like geometrical figures, varios points of view and organization (prespective), symbols, etc. For instance, "white wall" is an idea, and for a painter, white wall has different intensity in each point, painter will perceive all various shades and reflections from nearby objects on particular wall, but ideally, white wall is still white in pitch darkness. In technical drawing, thickness of line is also ideal, this kind of drawing gives ideal outlines of an object within a perceptual frame different from the one used by painters.

Painting is used as a mode of representing, documenting and expressing all the varied intents and subjects that are as numerous as there are practitioners of the craft. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life or landscape painting), photographic, abstract, be loaded with narrative content, symbolism, emotion or be political in nature. A large portion of the history of painting is dominated by spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to biblical scenes rendered on the interior walls and ceiling of The Sistine Chapel to depictions of the human body itself as a spiritual subject.

Color and tone are the essence of painting as sound and pitch are of music. Color is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but elsewhere white may be. Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, Newton, have written their own color theory. Moreover the use of language is only a generalisation for a color equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red of the visible spectrum of light. There is not a formalised register of different colors in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as C or C# in music, although the Pantone system is widely used in the commercial printing and graphic design industry for this purpose.

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