Image credit: The National Gallery, London
Impasto (Italian for 'dough' or 'mixture') is a painting technique that creates heavily built-up and highly textured areas of paint. Often, painting strokes or palette-knife marks are visible. It was first noticed in the work of Venetian Renaissance artists such as Titian and Tintoretto, and it can be found in the later work of Baroque painters including Rembrandt and El Greco. Impasto is a feature of much modern painting – Vincent van Gogh is especially known for his expressive impasto technique, as are Jackson Pollock and Frank Auerbach.
