Brushwork is the character of the marks the brush leaves — their shape, direction, edge, weight, and degree of visibility on the surface.
To describe brushwork is to describe how the paint was put down: short or long strokes, dry or loaded, blended or kept distinct, broken or continuous, soft-edged or crisp. Brushwork can be subordinated entirely to the depicted form (smooth, invisible, finished), or it can remain assertive (visible, varied, insisted on), and most pictures sit somewhere along that range. The Italian fa presto tradition and the older notion of facture both name closely related ideas. Brushwork is one of the first things attribution looks at, since habits of handling tend to be specific to a hand, but it is just as useful for plain description: the brushwork tells you how the surface was thought about.
See also
- mark-making — the wider term that includes non-brush marks
- gesture — the kinetic dimension of brushwork
- impasto — brushwork built up in heavy relief