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What is Painting?

Painting is one of the oldest and most studied subjects in the arts, appearing across art history, studio art, humanities, and general education courses. Essays on painting ask students to move beyond casual observation and engage with how visual works are constructed, what they communicate, and how they fit into broader cultural and historical contexts. Works such as Raphael's School of Athens, the Mona Lisa, The Marriage Feast at Cana, and Cimabue's Enthroned Madonna and Child appear frequently as primary subjects because they reward close formal and contextual analysis. Artists including Kandinsky, Peter Paul Rubens, and others represented in student work offer additional angles into how individual style and artistic intention shape meaning.

Student papers on this topic take several distinct approaches. Descriptive and comparative essays examine how painters use light, figure placement, and composition to guide the viewer's eye and establish a scene's mood. Some papers focus on a single work or artist in depth, as with analyses of Kandinsky or Michael Parkes, while others place two paintings side by side to highlight contrasts in technique or subject matter, as seen in comparisons of works like La Grenouillère and Wheat Field with Cypresses. Museum response papers represent another common format, asking students to reflect on direct encounters with original works.

A strong essay on painting anchors its argument in specific formal elements — the treatment of a figure's face, the use of light, the relationship between foreground and background — rather than relying on vague impressions. A focused thesis takes a clear position on what a painting achieves or means. The most common pitfall is summarizing what is visible without explaining why those choices matter to the work's overall effect.

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Paper High School

Five Notable Examples of Medieval Art and Architecture

I have travelled around the world and looked for the top five examples of Medieval Art. I believe the following are these:

Research Paper Doctorate

Cézanne's Still Life with Apples: Style and Meaning

¶ … Life with Apples," ca. 1893-94. The original work is an oil on canvas, hung in the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. Cezanne painted many still lifes, and many with apples, but this is one of his most interesting…

Research Paper Doctorate

Television's Impact on Child Literacy and Reading Habits

Ever since it became a household fixture more than fifty years ago, parents and educators have asked the same question - is there such a thing as too much television? Can television interfere with a child's desire to…

Research Paper Doctorate

Rembrandt's Christ Preaching: Technique and Biblical Vision

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn was a prolific artist from seventeenth century, producing at least six hundred paintings, three hundred etchings, and two thousand drawings. His works are known for being dramatic and devoid…

Research Paper High School

Bernini and Caravaggio: Baroque Art, Religion, and Sensuality

This paper discusses two works of art from the Baroque period. It talks about Bernini's "Ecstasy of St. Teresa" and also about Caravaggio's "Crucifixion of St. Peter." The two paintings illustrate how religion can be not all about perfect pristine things. It can be sensual and it also can be very violent and ugly, both of which need to be remembered.

Essay Doctorate

African-Americans and Social Classes in Colonial America

History – Colonial America African Americans in Colonial America experienced the United States differently, depending on whether they lived in the North or South. The American South of the 17th and 18th Centuries was dominated by agricultural life, particularly plantation life, and that set the stage for high black population of slaves who were oppressed in every major area of life. Meanwhile, the more industrial North also had slavery but to a lesser extent and with a high percentage of indentured servants, allowing greater freedoms in basic areas of life and also the possibility of being completely free. The John Catherwood letter indicates many aspects of Colonial life, including but not limited to the status of the two correspondents, immigration and the practice of indentured servitude. Finally, examination of the craftsmen, plantation owners and slaves on a plantation illustrates the three major classes in Colonial America, with craftsmen in the middle class, plantation owners in the gentry class and slaves in the lowest class.

Van Gogh's Use of Color in The Sower and The Night Café

Van Gogh's careful reflection on choosing a palette and especially his focus on contrast define the mood and set the tone in two of his paintings, The Sower and the Night Café. Although there are several human beings in the latter, the main impression in this scene is that of loneliness since even the only couple in the image is meant to take away all hope. The other couple in the former, the working man and the tree appear to be more on the allegorical side in spite of their earthiness. The Night Café is the depiction of an interior where everything seems to take life away from its sources and transform it into something that is of little value, therefore the shades of greenish yellow are dominating the scene. When there are bright colors, such as the yellow glow coming from the hanging lamps, they are meant to hurt the eye, not to cast light upon a subject. At the other end of the spectrum, quite contrary to what the painter meant to illustrate in The Night Café, The Sower strikes as the study of life's sources along with its mystery. The first impression upon viewing it is powerful. The dark tree silhouette crossing the painting from the lower right corner, on a diagonal, up to the farther left corner, along with the dark silhouette of the sower clearly dominate and strike as intriguing at first. Then one notices the earthy tones that creep up the tree's trunk and extend to the sower's otherwise featureless face and hands. This brown, slightly yellow clay color, is strongly and intently coming over through the human flesh and the bark and leaves of the tree and not from the soil itself.

Research Paper Masters

Walter Benjamin's Aura and Mechanical Reproduction of Art

This essay discusses Benjamin's notion of a work's aura, using an image of Benjamin himself as a case study. Benjamin argues that a work's aura is dependent on its particular time and space, and that mechanical reproduction erases this aura by allowing that work to occupy any time and space. While this may or may not be a good thing, understanding how reproduction allows an image to transcend time and space is crucial for understanding how cultural transmission works in the age of digital reproduction.

Exoticism in 19th and 20th Century Opera: Carmen and Madama Butterfly

Exoticism in 19th and 20th Century Opera Exoticism was a cultural invention of the 17th Century, enjoying resurgence in the 19th and 20th Centuries due to increased travel and trade by Europeans in foreign, intriguing continents. The "West," eventually including the United States, adapted and recreated elements of those alluring cultures according to Western bias, creating escapist art forms that blended fantasy with reality. Two examples of Exoticism in Opera are Georges Bizet's "Carmen," portraying cultural bias toward gypsies and Basques, and Giacomo Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," portraying cultural bias toward the Far East. Butterfly's "exotic geisha" imagery of the Far East and Carmen's "earthy Spanish gypsy" imagery originating from the Middle East blossomed from escapist original source material that was borrowed and embellished to create some of the finest operas of the modern art world. Though the premieres of both operas were poorly received, both "Carmen" and "Madama Butterfly" survived to become classic, enduring masterpieces.

Paper Undergraduate

Sharon Construction Stadium Project: Case Analysis

Sharon Construction company has won the bid to build a new 20,000 seat stadium, but several issues have arisen which are of concern to management of the project. Since the dual goals of any business endeavor are to both…

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