Art with Amruta … Impressionism , post Impressionism , expressionism

Hi all!It’s Amrita again!

With my’ HEART musings’…Ooops! what’s the matter with me …??! Correction!!

ART musings !

And the subject today ….close to my heart …

IMPRESSIONISM!!

So what’s so Impressive about Impressionism ?
A style of art … Of the mid 1800’s….perpetuated by a group of artists in Paris…. In the ‘Salon’….,.

Renoir ,Eduard Manet, Claude Monet ,

Sisley , Degas…

These artists broke away from traditional European painting .. Concentrating on landscapes and frivolous subjects of everyday living …

Here are some examples of impressionist paintings….all pretty happy nonconsequential pictures…!!

Just my type!!

What you notice instantly is BRIGHT BOLD shocking colours and SHORT brush strokes .. Sometimes only millions of dots ( pointilism)
The pictures are ‘FLEETING’ images ‘….captured by the artist… An artists ”impression” of what he just saw happen in front of him with great attention to the light falling on the subject AT THAT INSTANT …accurate , not exact but Full of vibrancy!

Have a look at a few more pictures..

Impressionists had to paint real fast … In order to ‘ CATCH’the picture as it happened!!
So OUT they would go with their easel and paint ( by now available in tubes kept in a case )

Catch the light and paint, paint ,paint …before the scene changed ..you know how quickly the sun sets… Right before your eyes..! That burst of rain, that light flickering on water .. OH SO ROMANTIC..However to arrest ??

Only with QUICK RUSHED FRIENZIED masterly strokes… !!

Not a wonder that impressionist paintings look rather ROUGH and UNFINISHED …!

In 1839 … Photography moved from the pinhole ..CAMERA OBSCURA to the ‘DAGUERREOTYPE’

introduced by Louis Daguerre )… For the first time the exposure time was REDUCED from a few hours to a matter of minutes!! The picture was seen on a silver plated copper sheet … This is more than a century before we progressed to DIGITAL cameras and microsecond exposure( 1990!)

The intro of practical photography influenced impressionists in a big way … They could now paint with ease on their easel as the picture they wanted to paint had already been captured!!!

Not only that… artists could now paint from a picture taken previously and even ‘stylise ‘it…..!

Let’s try to understand what stylising a painting would mean….

To illustrate the difference ,here is a photograph … and a stylised version of the same….

This is the foundation of post Impressionism…..

You had to be a real cool artist to stylise an ordinary scene … And VINCENT VAN GOUGH(1853to1890)perfected the art !

“real painters do not paint things as they are… they paint them as they themselves feel them to be.” (Vincent Van Gogh)
A Dutch painter with no formal training .. Plagued by mental illness …he laboured to remain sane…Producing a huge body of work ( over 2000 paintings) , mostly on paper ( both in watercolours and oil),.. In 1889 he sliced off his left ear and presented it to a brothel maid .. No one and nothing is worth that ! In 1890 he shot himself lethally dead in a cornfield outside the Arles sanatorium . Though he sold only ONE painting in his lifetime….this

Intensely sensitive , immensely talented… ICONIC TORTURED artist will be remembered forever …..

Here are a few of his works ..

Vincent Van Goghs friend was Paul Gauguin… They somewhat disagreed in style …here are pictures of the colourful Gauguin …
Note the exaggerated body sizes …. And the opulent Tahitian colours….