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painterly

[peyn-ter-lee]

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adjective

of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a painter.

Fine Arts. characterized by qualities of color, stroke, or texture perceived as distinctive to the art of painting, especially the rendering of forms and images in terms of color or tonal relations rather than of contour or line.

Origin:
1580–90; painter¹ + -ly

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Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Painterly is always a great word to know.

So is ninnyhammer. Does it mean:

a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes.

a fool or simpleton; ninny.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

painterly (ˈpeɪntəlɪ)

—*adj*
1.	Compare linear having qualities peculiar to painting, esp the depiction of shapes by means of solid masses of colour, rather than by lines
2.	of or characteristic of a painter; artistic

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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"Now the hand-painted image of a person is costly because the time of a well-trained artist is required to make it. The time spent by the painter is time spent seeing as well as making. Literally thousands of separate perceptions must be consolidated into a single image by the portrait painter. Even where the style is naturalistic and the technique meticulous, the necessary process of amalgamation entails synthesis, generalization, exag geration, and simplification. Hence, much as we admire the painter's craft, we know that it changes optical data. The invention and perfection of photography has taught us to see how painters change what they see. Oddly enough, we are less conscious of the fact that the camera also changes reality. Beyond that, most of us do not realize how much the photographer manipulates what the camera sees because we have been thoroughly conditioned to believe in the photographer's—as opposed to the painter's—mode of representing reality. For practical purposes this means that we regard photographic imagery as truthful while painterly imagery is viewed, at best, as poetic."

-Edmund Burke Feldman

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painterly

paint·er·ly