Painterly
adj
adj ·3 syllables ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Adjective
- 1 Characteristic of a painter or paintings.
"She always shows and never tells. For some poets, such a concentration on the concrete may imply a loosening of language and of perception, or an immersion into raw emotion. Instead, Becker clothes the everyday in a spare, painterly clarity of perception."
- 2 Having clear brush-strokes.
Adjective
- 1 having qualities unique to the art of painting wordnet
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"His paintings are explosions of curving lines, shapes and colors. In his art you can see every movement that his arm made. You can see how he had to move his body around the canvas. Videos of Pollock painting show this process, which looks like a painterly dance."
Etymology
From painter + -ly.
More for "painterly"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.