Acrylic painting uses synthetic polymer emulsion as a binder. Learn how Pollock, Rothko, and Hockney adopted a mid-20th-century medium that dries in minutes and resists water.
Touch a dry oil painting and the surface feels waxy, slightly yielding, like a film that is still becoming itself even after centuries. Touch a dry acrylic painting and the surface feels like plastic. That is because it is plastic. Acrylic paint dries to a synthetic polymer film, a material that did not exist before the 20th century and that changed painting more fundamentally than any invention since the paint tube. Acrylic is the medium of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and contemporary mural painting. It is what most art students reach for today, and it is the reason a painting can be finished in a day rather than a month.
Acrylic painting is the practice of using paint made from pigment suspended in an acrylic polymer emulsion. The paint is water-soluble when wet, dries rapidly by evaporation to form a water-resistant, flexible polymer film, and can be applied to almost any surface that is not oily or waxy. Unlike oil paint, which dries by oxidation over days and weeks, acrylic dries by evaporation in minutes to hours. Once dry, the polymer film cannot be reactivated with water. The paint is permanent.
This entry covers how acrylic paint works, its relatively short but consequential history, the artists who adopted it, and how it compares to oil paint in practice and conservation.
Acrylic paint consists of three main components: pigment, an acrylic polymer emulsion (the binder), and water (the solvent). The polymer emulsion is a dispersion of acrylic resin particles in water. When the water evaporates, the polymer particles come into contact and coalesce into a continuous film that traps the pigment particles within it. This process, called film formation, happens quickly. A thin layer of acrylic paint can be touch-dry in 10 to 20 minutes, depending on temperature, humidity, and paint thickness.
The speed of drying is acrylic's defining characteristic and its main practical difference from oil paint. Oil paint's slow drying allows for extended blending and reworking on the canvas. Acrylic's fast drying does not. You cannot blend acrylic on the canvas for more than a few minutes before the paint sets. This forces a different working method: acrylic painters tend to work in distinct layers, building up the image through successive applications rather than blending everything wet-on-wet. Retarding mediums can slow the drying time, giving painters more open time, but even with retarders, acrylic dries faster than oil.
The polymer film that acrylic forms is flexible, which means acrylic paintings are less prone to the cracking that affects oil paintings as they age. The film is also water-resistant when dry, which means acrylic paintings can be displayed in humid environments where watercolors or gouache would be damaged. However, the polymer film is not chemically inert. Research has shown that acrylic paint films are vulnerable to degradation from atmospheric pollutant gases. A 2021 study in Polymers examined the effect of pollutant gases on acrylic emulsion films, finding that sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides react with water molecules in the paint to form acidic products that attack the acrylic matrix and promote surfactant migration to the surface. This migration appears as a whitish bloom and is a significant conservation concern for acrylic paintings. Read the study at MDPI Polymers.
Acrylic paint is a 20th-century invention. The first acrylic polymer emulsion was developed in the 1930s by the German chemical company Rohm and Haas, initially for industrial and architectural use. The artist-grade acrylic paints that would transform painting appeared in the 1950s. Leonard Bocour and Sam Golden, working in New York, developed paint lines marketed under names like "Magna" (a mineral spirit-based acrylic resin paint) and later "Liquitex" (the first water-based acrylic emulsion paint for artists, introduced in 1956).
The timing was not coincidental. The 1950s and 1960s were the decades of Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, and Pop Art, movements that valued scale, flatness, and speed. Oil paint's long drying time was a liability for painters working on canvases 10 or 15 feet across who wanted to cover large areas with flat, even color. Acrylic dried fast enough to allow rapid layering, could be thinned with water to create stains that soaked into unprimed canvas, and could be poured, splashed, and applied with tools other than brushes.
A 2024 collection of studies published in npj Heritage Science under the title "Thoroughly Modern: Materials and Methods" examined how artists embraced innovative materials born from industrialization, including synthetic pigments and commercially manufactured paints. The research highlighted how the adoption of synthetic media like acrylic represented a profound shift in both the creative process and the conservation challenges associated with modern artworks. Read the collection at Nature.
By the 1970s, acrylic had become the default paint for many contemporary artists. It was cheaper than oil, easier to clean up (water rather than solvents), and more forgiving on non-traditional supports. Acrylic also enabled techniques that were difficult or impossible in oil, such as staining unprimed canvas, pouring thick pools of paint, and working on a scale that would be impractical with slow-drying oil.
Pollock's drip paintings from 1947 to 1950, including Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (1950, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), were made with both oil and commercial alkyd-based paints, but his adoption of synthetic media pointed toward the future. The fluidity of these industrial paints allowed Pollock to pour, drip, and fling paint across canvases laid on the floor, a method that would have been impossible with stiff tube oil paint alone.
Rothko's Color Field paintings, including No. 61 (Rust and Blue) (1953, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), used thinned acrylic and oil paints that soaked into unprimed canvas, creating the effect of color floating in space rather than sitting on the surface. The staining technique, which depends on a fluid paint that penetrates the canvas fibers, was one of acrylic's signature contributions to painting.
Hockney's A Bigger Splash (1967, Tate, London) is one of the most recognizable acrylic paintings. The flat, even blue of the swimming pool and the stark white splash were painted in acrylic, which allowed Hockney to achieve the clean, graphic flatness that the image demands. The painting demonstrates acrylic's capacity for opaque, uniform coverage that would be difficult to achieve as quickly in oil.
Frankenthaler pioneered the soak-stain technique with Mountains and Sea (1952, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), pouring thinned paint onto unprimed canvas so that it soaked in and created soft, atmospheric color fields. While she initially used oil, she switched to acrylic in the 1960s because the synthetic polymer, thinned with water, soaked into the canvas more cleanly and dried without the yellowing that affects oil binders over time.
Warhol used acrylic paint alongside his silkscreen techniques in works like the Marilyn Diptych (1962, Tate, London). The flat, garish colors of the Marilyn portraits depend on acrylic's ability to produce even, opaque coverage that mimics the look of commercial printing. Warhol's use of acrylic was part of his broader embrace of industrial materials and mass-production aesthetics.
The choice between acrylic and oil is not just about drying time. Oil paint has a longer working time, greater transparency in glazes, and a surface quality that ranges from glossy to satin. Acrylic dries faster, is more opaque in its natural state, and dries to a uniform matte or satin finish. Oil paint can be reworked for days. Acrylic cannot. Oil paint yellows and cracks over centuries. Acrylic does not yellow, but its polymer film can soften in heat, attract dirt, and develop surfactant bloom.
Conservation of acrylic paintings is an active and challenging research field. A 2025 study in ChemPlusChem examined a vandalized 1973 acrylic painting by Giorgio Griffa, using spectroscopic techniques to characterize the composition and aging of the acrylic paint and to develop conservation treatments for marker damage. The study highlights how the chemical instability of modern synthetic paints poses challenges that conservators of Old Master paintings do not face. Read the study at Wiley ChemPlusChem.
Another conservation concern is varnishing. Many modern acrylic paintings were left unvarnished by their creators, and applying varnish changes the surface appearance in ways the artists did not intend. A 2025 study in Studies in Conservation investigated suitable retouching materials for unvarnished acrylic paintings, finding that watercolor, gouache, and Aquazol offered the best aesthetic matches and reversibility for conservation retouching on acrylic surfaces. Read the study at Taylor & Francis.
Acrylic is the most widely used painting medium in art education and amateur practice today. Its ease of cleanup, low odor, fast drying, and affordability make it the practical choice for schools, community studios, and home painters. Professional artists continue to use it for its specific properties: the ability to stain canvas, to build thick texture with gel mediums, to pour and pool, and to work at large scale without the logistical challenges of oil.
Acrylic has also evolved as a material. Modern acrylic paints are available in a range of formulations, from fluid "soft body" paints to heavy-body paints that mimic the texture of oil, to high-flow paints that can be used in airbrushes and pour techniques. Interference and iridescent acrylics, which contain mica particles that shift color depending on the viewing angle, have no equivalent in oil paint.
Acrylic paintings are less fragile than watercolors and can be displayed permanently, which means they are more likely to be on view in museums. Look for Hockney's A Bigger Splash at the Tate in London, Rothko's Color Field paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and Frankenthaler's stain paintings at MoMA in New York.
When you stand in front of these works, compare the surface to nearby oil paintings. The acrylic surface is flatter, more uniform, and slightly plastic in quality. It lacks the depth and luminosity of oil glazes but has a directness and clarity that oil cannot match. For more on how paint handling shapes what you see, read our entries on oil painting, Color Field painting, and action painting, or explore our blog post on how to read a painting.
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