Impressionism

Impressionism is a style of painting that began in Paris in 1874. Unlike artists before them, the impressionists painted most of their paintings outdoors and liked to portray natural subjects like trees, fields, and oceans. Impressionists would often take their materials outdoors and paint what they saw. This is called painting “en plein air.”

When impressionists painted pictures of people, they made them look like people you would see every day rather than painting religious figures or royalty seen in museums, galleries and stately homes. They often used their own family and friends as subjects in their paintings.

Before the impressionists, painters usually placed the main subject of their painting focussed in the centre. It was the first thing the viewer looked at and the background was not nearly as important.  Impressionists often put more emphasis on the scene than on the person or main subject of the painting. To do this, they painted the main subject off to the side rather than in the centre. An impressionist painting looks more like a photograph in this way. A photograph captures not only the main subject, but everything around the subject and everything in the photo is important. Photography was just becoming popular in the mid-1800s and influenced the way the impressionists looked at things.

The style was called impressionism because the artists were not as tough about painting a realistic picture. They used many short brush strokes, applying paint thickly, to create the idea, or impression, of a subject. Vincent van Gogh is a good example of this technique. The paint on his canvases is often so thick it looks 3D. When looking at this painting, Starry Night closely, one notices the short brush strokes. Also, the painting is so thick that you can see the shadows from the paint. Because of the quick, short strokes, if you stand very close to an impressionist painting and look at it, often the painting won’t look like anything but a bunch of paint blobs. When you back away from it, though, you can see the whole picture.

Another characteristic of impressionist painting is the study of light. The way light changed the shadows and colours of subjects was of much interest to impressionists. For example, Claude Monet often painted in series, making many pictures of the same subject at different times throughout the day and in different seasons to see how the lighting affected his paintings such as ‘houses of parliament’ which I have painted using ink and water making a  vibrant effect.