Impressions

The impressionists were a group of French painters largely beginning to gain prominence around the late 19th century. Led by Monet who had had enough of paintings of royalty. The funny kind of self portraits, Louis XIV type. Painting, he said, should represent what the human eye sees. And he pursued, what I believe, a scientific approach (as scientific as you could get in the late 19th century). He observed that what the human eye sees when it sees a field of grass is not essentially each blade of grass and it's shade in every detail. Rather, what it sees, would be blobs of colours yellows, greens, dark greens, whites, blacks juxtaposed next to each other in a certain pattern, which when seen from a distance mixed optically to form the composite picture of the field of grass. To Monet, the quest was to represent this pattern of distinct colours without mixing them, so that once you saw the composite mixture your eyes would see as if seeing real life. And saying this, he set off in the singular most significant quest in his life. To paint in a way that would replicate what the eye sees. He sat entire days, waking up only only to stare at a building or whatever the subject was to try and understand how light and shadow lent the colours various shades. How each shade interacted with each other creating the impression the eye saw. To get underneath what the human eye saw and took for granted every living moment. And this is the way he painted!

Rock Arch West of Etretat

Guess what the real thing looks like?

Now, here are a couple of mental exercises before you click on the pictures to see the larger versions. Try and list mentally the colours you would have on the rock and the water from the picture. Then take a look at the painting (click on it to view the large version) and have a look at the colours used. Also, notice how the colours when applied on the canvas are not mixed. They don't blend into each other. No matter how unlikely the colour, they're all existing juxtaposed next to each other unmixed.

Monet was this huge guy. The kind who would walk into to a room and the centre of gravity would shift towards him. Just as he envisioned this new way of painting, so did he influence a whole lot of other guys. And so grew the impressionist movement where a lot of these painters met up at a cafe near Monet's studio in France, discussed techniques and styles and developed impressionism further.

One person of course who stood out the most, whose name is possibly synonymous with art, is Van Gogh. Van Gogh's genius lay, according to my limited explorations of this whole new hobby, in his intuitive understanding of colour relationships. His brilliance absolutely is from the way Starry Night on the Rhone

 just lights up from the inside. There's a brightness from the stars, from the lights by the river that seem to come out of the painting and fall onto you! There are other similar paintings; The Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night, the very famous Starry Night. In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh mentions how it is wondrous to him that the night can be painted without any black colour. He refers to the night outside the Cafe at Place du Forum, Arles. And if you check out the painting and the others, it indeed lacks use of black almost completely. In fact I even came upon a paper that concludes that Van Gogh's style, the swirls and spirals coupled with the use of luminosity actually convey a feeling of motion to the viewer!Of course the fact that he suffered deeply in his last years and finally committed suicide may add to his legacy. But it surely can never take away from the genius he was.

What's most interesting is the sudden new perspective pursuing/developing something like this can give you. And it's amazing to realize that whatever we see everyday could have so many aspects to it. For starters, the next time you step out of your office or home and look at the sky or some trees in the sunlight try and count the number of distinct colours you see.