Impressionism's Culture, Craft & Influences

Culture

Impressionism as a movement was formed from a rich interchange of ideas inspired by dialogue, debate, and mutual collaboration. These artists were successful because they had one another as inspiration. Their café culture helped establish a new university of the mind where they were free to exchange ideas that transcended the Academy's top-down model of which they were initially a part.

 For the first time, a form of creative cross polymerization took place between different social classes and among men and women artists. These diverse gatherings helped enrich their work and eventually helped them weather the storm of negative criticism from the art critics, the official salon, and the public.

 The Impressionists worked in building their new ideas and method from peer-to-peer critique and counsel. They socialized, shared and debated, painted and exhibited together, yet moved forward as individuals, not clones of each other.  The Impressionists advanced beyond former categories of acceptable subject matter and projected a new way of thinking about the unstaged and naturalistic depictions of the environment around them.  Their culture was strong because they wanted to paint their time, their age.

Though radical for its time, Impressionism became and is still today one of the most beloved art forms. The Impressionists’ approach is a model for us today.

Craft

Impressionism was a radical departure from the Academy's classical techniques of the Old Masters. Even though the Impressionist rejected many preconceived notions about painting that the Academy taught, craft was still important to them and is still for us today.

Nevertheless, Impressionist artists still practiced time-honored formulas of proportions and perspective in composition to achieve representational harmony. This synthesis and adaptations through enhanced traditional methods created the extraordinary art form we appreciate today.

During this Master Class, I will be presenting more on the foundations of composition, color, and light.

Influences

Significant developments in technology shaped their world, and it does for us today. The railways freed them to travel from city to country while carrying their portable supplies. New ideas in color theory changed the application process on the picture plane by using simultaneous contrast and optical mixing.   Japanese color woodblock prints gave them a fresh insight into design, while Photography freed them to paint personalized subject matter.

They took advantage of manufactured premixed paints in tubes that were time-saving and ideal for working outdoors.  Previously, each artist had to make their paints by grinding and mixing dry pigment powders with linseed oil and storing them in pig bladders. These manufactured paints and art supplies quickened the painting process allowing for their artistic expression of the moment! Now easels were portable, all-terrain, lightweight, and collapsible, and suited for open-air painting.

The gleaming world of Impressionism surpassed not only the traditional color palette of the Academy but applied the paint differently. The paintbrush with hog hair helped to create a new type of brushstroke, allowing for a unique movement of the artist's hand thick with paint. Its new distinct shape of being rounded on the tip and flat on its sides of the filbert allowed more variations than the previous old master round tips with cylindrical sides.

Instead of glazing, Impressionists applied fragments of pure color in modulations of opacity and transparency, establishing themselves as craftsmen and craftswomen in a new way. They used a technique of broken spaced strokes that formed from verities of small, thick strokes of paint in a sketchy way, allowing the artist to capture flickering light and giving emphasis to the essence of the subject rather than its detail.

Assignment– Your Influences

What cultural influences of today do you find most inspirational?

Since the Impressionists used the technology of their day, what technological tools, do you use for your artwork?  (I recommend to my students if they have a camera on their phone or iPad to use it as a viewfinder.)

Do an inventory of your art supplies – paints, brushes, easels, etc. (As we move onto the other sections of the Master Class, we will offer a listing of essential supplies for studio and en plein air.)