STORY 3: DECORATION

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE

In this section, I will talk about my painting and the use of paint as a decorative tool throughout history.

Paint as decoration is probably the most obvious “story” on my list. I’m sure many of us have gone to a Home Depot and picked out paint colors for our houses and/or have a car that’s painted. But decorating things by painting them is not new. The Egyptians covered the walls of tombs with symbolic paintings using a color palette of red, green, blue, yellow, white, and black (Pigments Through the Ages). They combined pigments with a binding agent, applied a thin layer of plaster, and then applied the paints on top of it to make them last longer. The Minoans used a similar method; they would apply the pigments to fresh lime plaster surfaces, some of which are still visible today. The Greeks and Romans used these methods as well, occasionally expanding upon them. For example, the image above is of a fresco entitled Tomb of the Diver from 470 BC in Paestum.

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During the Industrial Revolution, ready mixed paints were introduced in the United States (American Coatings Association). In the mid-1800s, paint factories and machinery made the production process more accessible and efficient marking the introduction of the ready-made paints we use today.

To represent paint as a tool for decoration, I painted myself decorating a ceramic pot. Decorating pottery is also one of the examples I found in my research and it reminded me of the ceramics class I took in high school.

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References:

• “Choose a Time Period.” Pigments through the Ages - Choose a Time Period, www.webexhibits.org/pigments/intro/history.html.

• “History of Paint.” American Coatings Association, 6 Apr. 2021, www.paint.org/about/industry/history/.