hope you saved your airsickness bag from your last flight!
painterly is a fine old word, here's the whole OED screed:
a. Like, or pertaining to, a painter; characteristic of a painter, artistic; spec. of a style of painting, characterized by qualities of colour, stroke, and texture rather than of contour or line. Also transf. b. adv. In a way proper to a painter, artistically. rare.
a1586 Sidney Arcadia i. (1590) 55 It was a very white and red vertue, which you could pick out of a painterly glosse of a visage. 1822 T. G. Wainewright Ess. & Crit. (1880) 248 A painterly arranged exclamation of this kind. Ibid. 261 How well made up—how painterly! 1932 Times Lit. Suppl. 16 June 441/1 A linear style and a ‘painterly’ (a translation of the German word malerisch, which can also mean picturesque). 1942 Burlington Mag. Jan. 24/2 A technique which foreshadows the painterly methods of Watteau. 1950 Eng. Stud. XXXI. 166 One should not forget the exciting Kiplingesque rhythm+or the painterly qualities of the dramatic, colourful poem of Cummerbund, the monster of India. 1952 H. Read in P. & L. Murray tr. H. Wölfflin's Classic Art p. vi, One word, however, calls for comment—the word ‘painterly’, which has been invented to convey the meaning of the German word malerisch.+ It stands for that depreciation and gradual obliteration of line (outline and tangible surface) and for the merging of these in a ‘shifting semblance’ of things—it is an attempt to represent the vague and impalpable essence of things. 1958 Observer 23 Mar. 16/5 Short lyrics of precision and beauty, painterly poems, touchingly infused with the poet's passion for what is beautiful. 1958 Times 24 July 5/2 His recent attempts to exchange a linear for a more painterly manner. 1962 Punch 1 Aug. 177/3 Alberta Wheeler, ex-night club dancer and painterly genius. 1963 Guardian 11 Mar. 7/2 He is becoming more painterly, his colour more subtle, and his surface dense with matter. 1969 H. E. Bates Vanished World xi. 147 It was not only the painterly quality of Crane's prose that attracted me. 1969 R. Mayer Dict. Art Terms & Techniques 276/1 Painterly, having the quality of expertly brushed workmanship.+ A term applied to the dominance of tonal masses over line as a means of defining form in painting, sculpture, and architecture. 1973 F. Taubes Painter's Dict. 176 Botticelli is a linear painter, whilst Rembrandt's work would be considered painterly. 1973 Times Lit. Suppl. 3 Aug. 900/3 The painterly aspect of each drawing is never forgotten: apart from shading with chalk or wash, in order to enliven a line or contour, pastels are employed and often coloured paper used. 1974 A. Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek xv. 268 A photograph of earth from space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung. 1978 P. Porter Cost of Seriousness 2 Masts for Woodbridge Crowd three degrees of the horizon, edging A painterly Dutch sky.
Hence "painterliness, painterly quality.
1955 P. Heron Changing Forms of Art xiii. 202 Hilton's conscious intention has been to eliminate all charm, all painterliness, even that evidence of mastery of the material which is itself a seductive element in painting. 1958 S. Spender Engaged in Writing iii. 43 Marteau's very appearance transformed the atmosphere from the weighted inwardness of Bonvolio-directed programme music, to cracking outdoor painterliness. 1977 Times Lit. Suppl. 24 June 761/5 Manet's painterly procedures—as well as his acknowledged painterliness.
