What is Lacquer Painting? Definition of lacquer painting

Lacquer painting is an art form that has developed a long time ago and is still loved at the present time all over the world. For the novice, what are the definitions like lacquer? Why is it called a lacquer painting? Tranhdep.com will help you better understand this type of painting art.

What is Lacquer?
Lacquer is one of the most widely used painting materials in the world. In Vietnam, lacquer is the result of research and development of the traditional craft of painting. Until the early 1930s, Vietnamese painters at the Indochina Fine Arts School discovered colored materials from: snail shells, eggs, bamboo... then applied the inherent lacquer technique to create paintings. true lacquer painting. The concept of lacquer has also gradually become popular in Vietnam since then.

What is Lacquer Painting?
According to the line of history in Vietnam, the first traces of lacquer were found hundreds of years ago. Our people have used the latex of gardenia to plaster boats; Then, through the Le, Ly, and Tran dynasties, respectively, many antiques are still preserved, many wooden or earthen statues are painted with gilded vermilion.

From the time when Vietnamese painters put new color materials into use, the art of Vietnamese lacquer painting officially flourished. It can be defined that lacquer painting is a type of painting that uses traditional materials in lacquer techniques such as: then paint, cockroach wing paint as a binder, and all kinds of lipstick, silver, gold, and mussel shells. to draw on a black background.

To create a complete lacquer painting, traditional lacquer artists usually take a lot of time, averaging about 6 months. Indeed, for those who do not have love and passion for this art, it will be very easy to give up. The use value of paintings also lasts for a long time if people who play paintings know how to preserve and cherish.
Materials used for popular lacquer painting
A complete work of lacquer painting will need a lot of different materials including: paint, color... The main material to make lacquer is latex extracted from the bark of the gardenia tree. Latex of gardenia has high stickiness and is very durable, resistant to rain, salt water, high humidity. Up to the present time, the commonly used materials for painting include:

Paint: Exploited from gardenia trees, in addition, Trau oil, filling oil, turpentine and resin are also used.
Color: Traditional lacquer uses 2 basic colors: black and red cockroach wings, the color is made from inorganic minerals (for example, lipstick) so it does not decompose before light and time.
Silver products such as sterling silver, glued silver, ground silver, beam silver.
Gold products such as gilded gold.
Other materials: eggshell, mussel shell, snail shell, scallop powder.

With the strong development of lacquer painting today, the requirements for techniques and materials used to make paintings are also constantly evolving and changing. Currently, the trend of using Japanese paint as raw material is quite popular, because, our paint has the limitation that it is easy to cause side effects for users and in addition, when using Japanese paint, the painting depends on the time. quite a lot. However, the paint material is still very popular because when looking at the picture it creates more depth for the picture.