The wiki for painting defines it to include both:
- verb: the act of painting
- noun: the object - framed, on canvas, etc
There also exists the tag painting_(object) which is undocumented but is presumably an attempt to separate the noun from the verb.
I'll give this a day or two and then if there are no objections by then, I will go ahead and formalize the split into two tags, edit the wikis accordingly, and sort the posts out.
[As an aside: both tags have a tendency to be misapplied to traditional_media, I'll clean those out as well.]
Would it be preferable to qualify the verb as painting_(action) and empty out painting to be marked as ambiguous?