Post impressionism

Post Impressionism:

Post impressionism began in the late 19th century as a ‘break free’ compared to the earlier ‘Impressionism’. Impressionism was very popular in the 1870’s and later, characterised by its use of small, visible brush strokes, open composition and ordinary subject matter. Impressionism gained popularity as cameras were becoming more prevalent, lessening the need for hyper-realistic painting. This allowed more personal style and choice to be communicated within a painting. In the early 1800’s, the camera obscura had become smaller and more portable, which made the ability to take photos anywhere much easier. As a result of this, it was no longer necessary for art to serve the purpose of capturing realistic images, as cameras are much less time consuming. Colour theory, especially the psychology surrounding colours, was being more understood within the 19th century, helping artists to convey further messages within their paintings just by using colours. From here, art movements strayed further from realism and more into more emotional styles, such as impressionism, where the painter can create more symbolic meaning within their paintings with more stylised choices. Impressionism was one of the fathering movements for capturing a feeling rather than a realistic image. This was made popular by French painters such as Claude Monet. Post Impressionism took the texture and relative style of Impressionism but focused on more symbolic, stylized and emotional topics, compared to landscapes and realistic portrayals. Painters such as Paul Cezanne (known as the father of post impressionism) and Vincent Van Gogh are best known for post Impressionism.

Paul Cezanne: Cezanne, popularly known as the father of post impressionism, made work which transitioned the art world from late 19th century impressionism to 20th century cubism.

Methods: Paul cezanne uses impasto oil paint in his earlier works, categorised by his thick brush strokes. His early work has even been described as ‘violent in nature’ because of the hasty brush work. He started off working from his imagination, rather than a reference, until he befriended Pissarro Cézanne and they started painting outside. As this change occurred, his style became more structures and brighter in colour. Impasto oil painting involves layering thick oil paint on a surface (eg. canvas) to create texture. The brush strokes are often large and loose, vaguely creating the shapes within the painting. The mind of the viewer fills in the rest of the detail. Understand the nature of the brush work - faceted, directional but not logical to the illusion of the form, dark outlines and blank canvas often visible.

From my impasto experiment, following “three pears”, I have come to the conclusion that cezanne must have used a dark base colour (organic black) and then painted over it with thick lighter colours, leaving edges to peak out as an outline. The brush strokes in the background go in different directions within different sections, while the brush strokes within the pears is mostly parallel to the sides of the paper (straight ish lines). This makes the background seem more organic while the pears seem more artificial with their very structured brush strokes.

Evelyn Page: Page is a post impressionist artist from New Zealand, who was active during the early to mid 20th century.  Page maily features still lifes, portraits, landscapes and nudes as her references. Her paintings are bright coloured, featuring plenty of thick white highlights, crowded frames and every day scenes. Her compositions are busy and often have dark shadows which juxtapose with the bright highlights of the foreground.  Her earlier work featured plenty of stylistic and subject influence from her teacher Cecil F Kelly, who taught still life and landscape paintings. His paintings fall under a gentle impressionism style, still relatively realistic with thick brush strokes and small amounts of impasto. The highlights are very bright and the shadows within most of his paintings aren’t overly harsh, creating a light and fresh feeling colour scheme. It is clear that the colour scheme stayed within Evelyn Page’s later works. Her later works feature influence from Sydney Thomas, a painter who lived in France for 12 years before meeting Evelyn. Thomas’s work features more post impressionism and abstract style features compared with Kelly, and it is clear that the thick paint application, blended highlights and open compositions, which are very heavy influences for Evelyn’s paintings, especially “Luncheon under ash” and “Oriental bay”. 

In my impasto experiment of “summer morn”, I came to the conclusion that Page used the brush strokes when painting the water to convey slightly wavey water. These strokes feature different shades of blue, plus other colours as reflection. Plenty of thick, white highlights were used in the original painting, which I tried to emulate. She also painted over part of the vines with blue to make the vines thinner.