Impressionist Art: History, Technique and Composition

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Table of Contents

Introduction
The Technique of an Impressionist
The Ingredients and Composition of the Paintings
Post-Impressionist Movement
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

It is important to have a brief history of the impressionism or impressionist movement. We recognize that modern painting began with a movement known as impressionism and was founded in Paris, France. The movement was formed as an opposition to the stiff folklore that was stringently favored by the societies like Impressionist Art Movement. In 1863, an artist known as Edouard Manet made public his painting; the painting caused some serious turmoil hence leading to the establishment of the impressionist movement (Porter and Prince, p. 38). Edouard Manet’s painting was rejected by judges who were subjectively guided by contemporary social settings, rather than by the number of art skills put into the painting. The rejected painting was that of a nude woman at a picnic with two dressed men. Coupled with other paintings which were not usual, Edouard Manet’s paintings led to an uproar by several groups of painters who were ranked by the judges as the poorest impressionists in the painting contests

Even though it was Edouard Manet’s paintings that led to the establishment of the movement and the fact that he was proclaimed the founder and leader of the movement, he did not attend the first display organized by the members of the movement and their subsequent exhibitions. The impressionist movement started gaining increasing popularity in 1874 when some artists formed groups started the public show of their paintings just outside the official salon. During the same year, the impressionist groups created the impressionism term; the term came about after the groups started criticizing Louis Leroy, a journalist who was employed by Le Charivari.

The Technique of an Impressionist

The work of painting is not just a mixture of colors and coming up with impressions. It takes skills and dedication to come up with meaningful paintings; the paintings depict some real issues in society. To come up with such a meaningful painting, using different colors to represent different issues, the artists normally use certain techniques. It is these techniques that will express their feelings, perceptions, and interpretation of the world around them. These techniques are acquired through constant practice and take time to perfect and be able to produce paintings.

In doing the paintings, petite and broad strokes of paint are used to swiftly get the real meaning of the theme, before the details of the intended painting. The paint is repeatedly applied to an area on the working surface. To create an effervescent surface, colors are applied alongside with as limited mixing as it may be deemed possible by the artist. Once the colors are used, the eyes of the viewer determine the ocular assimilation of the colors. During the painting process, dark and gray tones are created by combining complementary colors. However, it is important to note that pure impressionism does not involve the utilization of black paint. This made many of the paintings have a glistening brilliance.

Interestingly, during the painting process, wet paints are just placed on wet paints without giving time for the succeeding applications to dry out. The resultant outcomes are the smoother edges and amalgamation of colors. Most, if not all, of the paintings, are done in the evening to get the indistinctive impact of the light that appears in the evening or nightfall. Moreover, the paintings of an impressionist do not utilize the transparency of very thin films of paints otherwise known as glazes; the previous painting artists had carefully developed to create some desirable effects. One of the most important things to bear in mind is the fact the surfaces on which the painting artists do their paintings are opaque.

Natural light is one of the fundamental elements of painting; in the painting process, keen attention is given to color reflections that take place between objects. Paintings that are done outside buildings show shadows that are boldly depicted by the use of blue color of the sky so that it is reflected onto other surfaces so that it gives an impression of freshness

Throughout the history of artistic painting, these techniques have been used, even though the impressionists were the first to utilize all of these techniques together. During the development of the impressionists’ art movement, the impressionists took advantage of the premixed colors which were found in lead tubes. The premixing of colors and putting them in lead tubes started in the mid-century. That was a great breakthrough since it made easy the work of the painters and hence quickened their work; before, the painters mixed their paints personally, and that made them take long before coming up with a complete artistic work. The process of mixing colors involved pounding and mixing parched pigment powder with oil extracted from linseed, and the whole product would be kept in an animal bladder.

The Ingredients and Composition of the Paintings

Just before the advent of the impressionist movement, other painters who had already existed had placed their emphases on common themes, even though the approaches they used in forming the composition of their paintings were based traditionally. The painters positioned their compositions such that the dominant theme of paintings commanded the attention of the viewers. The artists relaxed the borderline between the background of their paintings and the subject so that the effect has got some semblance to a photograph, a component of wider reality that looks as if captured by possibility.

As much as impressionists gained momentum, photography also gained its equal measure of popularity during the same period. However, it is photography that offered a lot of motivations to the impressionists; the photography enabled the artists to capture moments of the scenery and the everyday life situations of the members of the society. Debatably, the establishment of the impressionist movement can be viewed as one of the responses staged by the painting artists to the lately introduced photography.

Photography, both at the time and currently, involves capturing still pictures of objects and natural phenomena. This offered a great challenge to the impressionist painters by breaking for the new grounds for capturing the real world or life situation as it is. Initially, it seemed like the work of photography demoralized the work of paintings since it portrayed impressionists’ paintings as deficient in their ability to reflect real-world situations. The fact is that photography reflected reality and had more details than paintings. Therefore, photography was superior to impressionists’ paintings; this made the impressionists think deeply about their impressions of realities. The effect of this was that the artists became more and more involved in producing works that give more details to portray the real world as it is.

Even though photography proved to be more superior to impressionists painting, the impressionists had and have never struggled to compete with photography. They instead found an area where photography had failed and sort to use that weakness in improving their paintings. Artistic painting has one most important feature that photography does not have. Whereas the paintings express the painters’ conception of nature around them, photography simply produces a mirror image of the objects captured or of the world. The artists, therefore, simply portray what they visualize and present their paintings in terms of their feelings and interpretations of the social setup of the society.

Each impressionist had his or her style of paintings. There are several features of the universe that painters can come up with. Such impressionists can either come up with paintings of people where an impressionist comes up with paintings of people in their everyday life activities; paintings of animals and or paintings of dancing women and men. In most cases, impressionists would want to express what they visualize, rather than the emotions they have within them; this implies that they represent what they see in front of them rather than an ideology.

Post-Impressionist Movement

Following the formation of the impressionist movement was the neo-impressionist movement. The movement was started during the post-impressionism movement in which a new method of using colors was designed. Before, colors were mixed and then applied to the working surface. However, in the neo-impressionist movement, neo-impressionists smeared varied primary colors to their working surfaces or canvas. The neo-impressionists applied the colors in groups of minute dots and let the eyes of the viewer complete the mixing of the colors. The new method of painting was called pointillism; pointillism played an important role in enhancing the radiance of the applied color pigments. The minute dots are applied very close to one another so that at some distance, the dots appear as a whole in the eye of the viewer and blazed with the highest luminosity. This new technique was called Chromoluminarism by a neo-impressionist painter known as Seurat (Feisner, p. 142).

The mixing of colors by the eyes of the viewers was dabbed divisionism by the earliest members of the neo-impressionists movement. According to the color theory, formulated by Eugene Chevreul, colors mixed optically by the viewer’s eyes, seemed to be more powerful and glowing than those that are combined physically. The neo-impressionist techniques were not picked up by many of the painters; however, they managed to influence a good number of painters who used the techniques in their painting work.

The post-impressionist movement, otherwise known as the neo-impressionist movement, was not formal as such; the movement included painters who were opposed to the limitations of impressionism. The work of the members of the impressionist movement lacked certain elements such as emotional, spiritual, symbolic, and structural elements. These are the things that the works of neo-impressionists sort to include in their painting work. It implies that the more the impressionists got involved in painting, the more they realized certain limitations which some of them never despised. Nevertheless, the painters who felt dissatisfied by the limitations rebelled against the movement leading to the establishment of the neo-impressionist movement.

The post-impressionist movement opened up ways for the establishments of other movements within the painting field. The establishment of these movements was necessitated by the need to make improvements in the way paintings were done. Currently, there are lots of changes going on in the painting industry. It is important to recollect that impressionists rely greatly on what they see in front of them rather than ideological perception. Given this, it is relevant to point out that with growing globalization and technological improvement, the focus and scope of impressionist paintings are increasingly widening.

Conclusion

The Impressionist art movement started in France during the rule of Napoleon III. The movement started as a protest by four painters whose works were rejected on moral grounds. The protest was led by Edouard Manet who has been associated with the formation and subsequent development of the impressionist movement. The impressionist painters were initially concerned with what they see in front of them and never relied on ideological perceptions. However, the neo-impressionist movement which is also known as the post-impressionist movement came up. The movement came up as a protest against the weaknesses of the impressionist movement. It argued that the impressionist movement lacked elements such as structure and emotions.

The advent of the neo-impressionist movement also witnessed the emergence of new painting techniques in which colors were applied in terms of dots on a canvas and then left to be mixed by the ocular view of the viewer’s eyes. In this case, the mixing of colors is left to be done by the eyes of the viewer. The neo-impressionist movement opened up the way for the establishment of other movements which sort to improve on the techniques of painting.

Works Cited

Feisner, Edith. Color: how to use color in art and design. Singapore, Laurence King Publishing, 2006.
Porter, Darwin and Prince, Danforth. Frommer’s Paris 2010: Volume 815 of Frommer’s Color Complete Guides. Hoboken, Frommer’s, 2009.

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