Painting is the practice of applying pigments, paint colour or another medium to a solid surface (matrix or substrate). The medium (oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolour, pastel, ink, spray, etc.) is usually applied at the base with a brush, but other tools, such as knives, sponges and airbrushes, can be used. The final work is also called a painting.

Painting is an important form in the visual arts, bringing elements such as drawing, gesture (gestural painting), composition, narrative (narrative art) or abstraction (abstract art). Paintings can be naturalistic and figurative (still life or landscape), photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolic (symbols), emotional (expressionism) or political (artivism).

In art, the term painting describes both the act, the medium and the result of the action. The support for paintings includes surfaces such as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, pottery, sheet paper, copper and concrete, and can incorporate multiple other materials such as sand, clay, paper, plaster, gold leaf, as well as objects.

The most famous painters and art works are:

• Léonard de Vinci with "Mona Lisa" or "La Joconde".
  
• Raphael with "The School of Athens"
  
• Michel-Angel "Adam's Creation"
  
• "The Young Girl with the Pearl" by Johannes Vermeer
  
• Rembrandt's "Night Round"
  
• Claude Monet and his "Water lilies"
  
• Vincent Van Gogh's "La nuit étoilée"
  
• "Guernica" by Pablo Picasso
  
• Gustav Klimt "The Kiss"
  
• "The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali
  
• Grant Wood's "American Gothic"
  
• "Bal du moulin de la Galette" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
  
• "Mont Sainte-Victoire" by Paul Cézanne
  
• "Le Cri" by Edvard Munch
  
• "Nighthawks" by Edward Hopper.

Also remarkable are painters such as Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Sandro Botticelli, Paul Rubens, Francisco Goya, Gustave Courbet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Marc Chagall, Le Caravage, Eugène Delacroix.

In more contemporary painting Gerhard Richter, Yan Pei Ming, Adrian Ghenie, Yue Minjun, Martial Raysse, Mark Grotjahn, Anselm Kiefer, Philippe Garel, Yoshitomo Nara, Gérard Garouste, Miquel Barcelo, Vladimir Velickovic, Rudolf Stingel, Georg Baselitz, Pierre Soulages, Marlene Dumas.

Abstract art is a style that does not seek to represent visible reality as landscapes, objects, animals, people or identifiable representations, even imaginary. The work therefore does not show any natural and recognizable shapes, it most often represents forms, more or less geometric and composed, with variations of colours, oppositions, movement, textures.