Skip to main content

Impressionism


Continuing our art movement investigations we looked at impressionism. The huge developments in technology effected the Impressionist movement and had a huge impact on how artist depicted paintings. Things changed hugely for artists with the introduction of steam engines, ready made paint tubes and the first portable cameras, for example, The camera made it possible for artist to use photography to capture or freeze a moment in time and then being able to reference back to them for later painting. For example

  • After the Bath (Woman Drying Herself) Edgar Degas 1896 - Oil painting

Because impressionist painters were interested in representing life around them, they looked to people and places for subject matter. This is why they were so effected by the industrial revolution, because their world was one of street lighting, steam trains, factories and the people around them.

Montmartre at Night Camille - Pissarro - 1897

claude monet gare saint lazare - 1877 - Oil painting

One thing i love about these looser impressionist paintings is there is no figure that needs to be highlighted over another, it really is an impression of a scene. As you can see these are painted from there environment, and have street lighting and a train station. With the advances in rail travel it meant artist could go to the country side and paint beautiful paintings of landscapes and nature.

Renoir introduced what has become to be known as his Rainbow Palette.This is the use of  pure pigments and abandoning the use of black.

These artist painted in complementary colour, to create harmonized tone in there paintings this seemed to be very important to Impressionist painters. A good example of this is:

haystacks midday - 1890 claude monet
As you can see he used yellows on the edges of the hay stack and on the ground, he used purple and blue hues to make the shadows, yellow and purple being complementary colours, and the oranges in the stack complementing the blue in the shadows as well as the red tones in the hay stack and greens in the ground. 






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Art & Design Portfolio - Sam Cornwell (Digital)

I decided to start my research on paper based and digital portfolios by first looking at a digital portfolio. One artist who came into the college to do a talk was a photographer called Sam Cornwell, he took us through his digital portfolio. I wanted to think about why his portfolio was digital and not paper based. One of the biggest advantages of a digital portfolio is the accessibility of it. It is easy to send out to employers or people wishing to view it. It is digital so it can easily be send to someone via email or put on a USB and accessed that way. Another reason is unlike a paper based portfolio there is more than one, it is easy to dispatch without spending money on paper to print. It is also instant, you might have to wait a few days for a paper port folio to be sent by mail or spend money on travel to bring it to the person wishing to view it. With a digital portfolio one click and it is sent! I went onto Sam Cornwell's page and found out his portfolio is on his web...

Starting experimenting with photography

After looking into the work of Henry Weston i decided to try and experiment,first, with negative space. It was something that stood out to me a lot in some of his work, as i spoke about in my report. i started by just taking a few pictures as i noticed it around me. I think these are a very interesting start and have a lot of potential, i decided to play around with the editing a bit by cropping them, changing the contrast and making them black and white.  i like this image and i think composition wise it works. i also think it looks good in black and white as it has gotten rid of the chance of clashing colours and sets a different kind of mood. The subject is in focus and it looks quite sharp. I cropped it a little and changed the contrast and exposure.  i prefer this image to the top one as i like the spacing between the feet compared to the first one i think it is more visually pleasing, i also rotated this image just as an experiment. ...

Art wolfe - My world, my view.

Another photographer i decided to look at is called Art Wolfe. Wolfe's work is a combination of Art and journalism, he graduated from the University of Washington with Bachelor’s degrees in fine arts and art education in 1975, since then he has worked on every continent, in hundreds of locations, and on a range of different projects. I started by looking into Wolfe's technique, i found a lot of information on the type of camera he uses (Canon’s 5DS R) and the lenses he uses - "Mostly “L” series lenses, Canon’s professional designation, the 16-35 f/2.8 L II and the 70-200 f/4 L IS. He uses extension tubes for macro work with the 70-200 and adds 1.4x extenders. But i wanted to look into his editing techniques not his equipment, although interesting and worth putting on here for future reference.   I found out Wolfe uses "Photo manipulation" in some of his photographs. Although his photographs are not heavily edited, he uses techniques like cloning the animal...