Painting Consciously

With the development of modern printing technology and that of image reproduction and electronic mass media, a series of new visual media has created a brand new "Image World" for us. The Mechanical Copy Images such as photographs, advertising, digital pictures and videos are found in every corner of the society, attracting people’s eyeballs and also changing traditional aesthetic experience. What kind of circumstances did painting, once the mainstream of the image world, meet when facing a new world? How did it develop? And where should us go nowadays? These are the issues that every artist must face. The first part of this article starts from photographic images, in which I analyze the differences between traditional painting and mechanical copy pictures, and I also summarize briefly the relation between modern painting and photography and printing technology. The second part is the main body of this dissertation. As the diversion of visual culture, how to introduce image into painting has become the subject of art development after modernism. Thus, I analyze chronologically and hierarchically the art creation of pop art and Andy Warhol, Photo Realism and Gerhard Richter, New-expressionism and Anselm Kiefer. In addition to explain their creation methods used to introduce images into their drawings, more importantly, I extract that artist’s creativity is not merely the author’s methodology of "creation for creation’s sake", but rather the emphasis of "painting". Painting is a reflection of "Painting Image" in the conclusion part of this article, and it also the viewpoint that the thesis demonstrates:as the artistic creation of the image age, artists should not just pursue the sociality and cultural meaning that are concealed in the drawing, neither should they neglect the pursuit of painting. Conversely, the pursuit of painting is a kind of aesthetic consciences of culture as well as the consciousness of painting in this image age.