Short answers, pulled from the story.
The oldest known figurative painting was created at least 45,500 years ago in the Leang Tedongnge cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia. A later discovery in the Lubang Jeriji Saleh cave pushes this timeline back to 51,200 years old. These ancient images prove that humans were producing complex rock art at opposite ends of the Pleistocene Eurasian world simultaneously.
The primary method of painting in the West before the early 1500s was tempera, a fast-drying medium made by mixing colored pigment with a water-soluble binder like egg yolk. Artists also utilized encaustic, or hot wax painting, where heated beeswax mixed with pigments was applied to wood panels. Oil painting began to replace tempera in Northern Europe with Early Netherlandish painters who used drying oils like linseed or poppyseed.
The invention of photography in 1829 fundamentally altered the purpose of painting by depriving it of its historic role as the primary method for accurately recording the observable world. Painters were forced to abandon the strict pursuit of realism that had defined their craft for centuries, which sparked radical art movements like Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. These movements challenged the Renaissance view of the world and moved Western art toward abstraction and self-consciousness.
Wassily Kandinsky theorized that music was the ultimate teacher for painting, believing that colors produced vibrational frequencies akin to chords played on a piano. He learned to play the piano and cello in 1871 and used musical terms to identify his works, calling his most spontaneous paintings improvisations and his more elaborate compositions. This synesthetic approach sought to express the inner feelings of the soul rather than the exterior world.
In the 20th century, the definition of what could be used as a painting medium expanded to include the human body itself, such as Andy Warhol's use of urine in his Oxidization series. Contemporary artists like Sarah Maple have used menstrual blood to create portraits to help erase the taboo covering the topic of periods. These works represent a shift where the painting is no longer just an image on a surface but a record of the artist's physical presence and biological reality.
Digital painting has emerged as a method of creating an art object digitally by adapting traditional mediums such as acrylic, oil, and ink to virtual canvases driven by software and industrial machinery. Artists now use programs like Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter to create images that can be printed onto traditional canvas. This technique blends the virtual box of brushes and colors with physical reality to continue the practice of applying pigment to a surface.