Painting workshops, Demonstrations, Artists cooperatives, Edinburgh
Painting
Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example, collage, which began with Cubism and is not painting in the strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet and Anselm Kiefer. (There is a growing community of artists who use computers to paint color onto a digital canvas using programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Painter, and many others. These images can be printed onto traditional canvas if required.)
In 1829, the first photograph was produced. From the mid to late 19th century, photographic processes improved and, as it became more widespread, painting lost much of its historic purpose to provide an accurate record of the observable world. There began a series of art movements into the 20th century where the Renaissance view of the world was steadily eroded, through Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism and Dadaism. Eastern and African painting, however, continued a long history of stylization and did not undergo an equivalent transformation at the same time.
Arts and Crafts
Arts and crafts comprise a whole host of activities and hobbies that are related to making things with one's hands and skill. These can be sub-divided into handicrafts or "traditional crafts" (doing things the old way) and "the rest". Some crafts have been practised for centuries, while others are modern inventions, or popularisations of crafts which were originally practised in a very small geographic area.
Most crafts require a combination of skill, speed, and patience, but they can also be learnt on a more basic level by virtually anyone. Many community centres and schools run evening or day classes and workshops offering to teach basic craft skills in a short period of time. Many of these crafts become extremely popular for brief periods of time (a few months, or a few years), spreading rapidly among the crafting population as everyone emulates the first examples, then their popularity wanes until a later resurgence.
Demonstrations
Demonstration is one way to define certain kinds of words. Demonstration is the simple act of pointing to an object, area, or place, like the sun, moon, or a large mountain top, and then naming and defining it. Basic definitions of words through demonstration, or pointing, allows humans to communicate, interact, plan, and co-ordinate in ways that help us to build cities, large buildings, technology, gain knowledge and to successfully communicate with computers. Basic propositions about time, space, and mathematics are first required to teach about true and probable statements or words that accurately describe universal qualities and quantities about nature, planets, species, and the world around us.
The history of demonstrative definitions goes back to the careful observations of ancient Greek philosophers and natural philosophy. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle attempted to carefully define words that included natural phenomena and objects. The modern scientific method often uses demonstrative definitions that carefully describe certain processes and parts of nature in great detail.