My favorite. Seurat's Gray Weather.
Please continue to discuss, ask questions, prod and push me. Post other images; let's have more fun trying to understand this difficult art.
Art Ap/Ed ping list. Let me know if you want on or off the list.
Van Gogh is my favorite. I could study his pictures all day long (if I didn't have to work, that is).
Thanks for the ping. I am enjoying your threads very much.
Don't know a whole lot about art. But I've always admired the artists who painted "a strict recreation of reality" - (as you worded it).
It just amazes me to see a painting that is so precise it looks like a photograph. I've 'attempted' a few art classes and realize how difficult it is to paint realistically.
But still I enjoy very much Monet, van Gogh, etc. And I'm even beginning to like modern abstract art.
Please include me in your ping list.
Once again, thank you. Could you perhaps give us all a succinct definition of the various styles followed by the more well known artists that followed that particular form? For example, define for us "realism," surrealism," "abstract," "Hudson River," "wacko-jacko," etc.
BTW, the "Poussin" painting seems to have similarities with the Hudson River School, in that both have distorted depth and larger than life trees in the forefront.
Cezanne is also creating depth by making foreground colors more intense (and the background colors more neutralized), and having greater value contrast in the foreground than the background. It works for me. To my eye, in that second landscape, with the brownish green foliage (forgot the artist's name and can't look back right now), some of the background trees look much too dark. It doesn't convey either a sense of light or a sense of distance nearly as well as Cezanne's does.
As for conveying form with color changes rather than values, I think I read somewhere that you can convey a curve of around 40 degrees solely with changing the color, cooling it as you move away from the light, without darkening the paint at all. Seems right to me.
I see what you mean about moving towards abstraction (although I've never thought of the Impressionists that way before), but if I imagine the same paintings without recognizable objects (say, all the shapes different so that I don't see trees, mountains, fruit, etc.), it seems to me that the paintings would then just be nothing special, of no interest. It seems to me that moving towards abstraction only stays interesting to the extent that you don't actually arrive there! :)
May I take issue with that comment? Admittedly, black was on the old master's palettes (most modern art teachers do not allow it) and colors were available in the late 19th century that were not invented yet in the time of the old masters. Rembrandt's palette, for instance is thought to have been limited to white, black, red oxide, yellow ochre, yellow, and occasionally, a blue of some kind. But he wouldn't just add black to darken a color, instead his cool black (ivory) mixed with white made a blue, his ochre, red oxide and black mixed, made anything from sienna to umber, his black mixed with ochre made green, etc. The old masters also used color in modeling, just a little more subtle at first glance. But you can see that they constantly did seemingly unintuitive things like putting amazingly bright oranges in shadows and cool blues and greens in the lightest lights. They frequently defied the modern rule that cools recede and warms come forward.
I would add that the Impressionists photograph and reproduce in print much more effectively than most of the older work, but that difference disappears when one actually sees the stuff in person.
Love this series! Post-Impressionism is close to being my favorite of all art styles.
Just as the 15th century artists were intent on showing the human form based on a bone and muscle framework, the Post-Impressionists were equally intent on the play of light. For the first time, artists took their work out of the studio and into nature. The freshness of the colors and the impression of objects as opposed to definition of line and the low light of the studio create masterpiece after masterpiece of joy and life and light. VanGogh was too intensely emotional to enjoy light for light's sake, so painted his soul.
Cezanne's style was a precursor to Cubism. VanGogh's style is generally accepted as the precursor of the Fauve movement (Matisse, et al).
Thanks once again RProfessor. I've enjoyed the first two threads and this one as well. The U of Free Republic has an outstanding faculty.
Thanks for the ping. Very interesting.
Peach Blossoms in the Crau, 1889
Irises, 1889