Yesterday I wrote a post in my
other blogabout how one's surroundings can affect one's creativity. In that post I tried to give a few examples of how living in one’s dreamhouse or dream surroundings can influence a person's creativity. I decided to use that post in this blog to go one step further, and concentrate on the differences in painting styles of the three artists that I'd discussed.
Paul Cézanne for example, tried to make his way in Paris, but eventually became convinced that only in his birthplace of Provence would he find and fulfill his quest for artistic truth. Provence is a land steeped in light and intense sensations, and there are very few landscape artists today who don't dream of traveling there to paint. Cézanne's method of painting has been considered unrefined and even crude by some. But the powerful body of work that he created around his beloved Aix-en-Provence, put that city on the international map as a site of unique value for its associations with the output of a genius. A few posts back, I talked about the difference between the tonalist painters and the colorists. Cezanne, an Impressionist, was obviously a colorist.
Paul Cézanne, House in Provence,near L'Estaque
It seems natural to move on to Claude Monet now, one of the founders of Impressionism and the painter whose painting "Impressions" was responsible for the naming of the movement.
Impressionism began when a group of very talented young French painters, including Monet and Cezanne, were rejected en masse from the 1863 exhibition at The Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. These upstarts wanted to paint things their way, and the people in charge, who were all a part of France’s powerful bourgeoisie, would not allow it. The Impressionists did not care about capturing a subject realistically, as the masters before them had done, and preferred to lay down swift impressions of what they saw without the detail. They painted outdoors because they wanted to capture the subtle nuances of light in the landscape, which was their focus. The Impressionists were all about color and light and they recorded slabs of colored shapes, rather than precise tonalist brushstrokes. To see examples and read more about the differences between a tonalist painting and a colorist painting, go
here
Like Cezanne, Monet's adoration for his dreamhome at Giverny is one of the most dramatic examples of how one’s surroundings can affect one’s craft.
The house itself, less than an hour southwest of Paris, is a typical French farmhouse with blue shutters. It's quite charming, almost quaint, and picturesque.
But it was undoubtedly the magic of the surrounding gardens at Giverny, rather than the house itself, that was the muse behind this artist. The gardens were filled with an ever-changing display of flowers, and the sweeping willows and cypress trees created dancing reflections upon the glassy surface of lily-covered ponds. Being a plein air painter of light, Monet spent hours painting the same beloved scenes over and over again, capturing different seasons, times of day, light temperatures, and atmospheric moods within a grouping. The famous lily pond, the old fishing boat, the footbridge, and the Japanese garden were all a series of paintings that Monet rendered in gorgeous vibrating color, as an expression of his art and obvious love for his precious Giverny.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, American painter Frederic Edwin Church was creating his very own dreamhouse.
The Hudson River School had its roots in European Romanticism, the very movement that the Impressionists spurned. It is considered the first coherent school of American art, and the Hudson River painters helped to shape the mythos of the American landscape. Church is considered to be one of the founders of the Hudson River School, at the point when it was evolving into the Luminist schools.
Although Church is considered a luminist, or painter of light, the luminists differ significantly from the colorists. The luminists attempted to depict light realistically on the canvas, portraying light beautifully upon water surfaces and distant mountains. A colorist on the other hand, will attempt to qualify the quality of light and it's temperature. An extreme example of this would be the warm, almost orangy light that can be seen in the landscape of a tropical island, as opposed to the cooler and almost grayish tones of a winter landscape in New england. The following is an example of Church's luminism, which you can compare to the painting of colorist Monet right below it.
Frederic Edwin Church- "Twilight in the Wilderness"
Claude Monet- “The Petite Creuse - Sun Light”
“About an hour this side of Albany is the Center of the World – and I own it”, wrote Frederic Edwin Church in the late 19th century. He was referring to the exotic dreamcastle he had built and named ‘Olana’, which means “our place on high” in Arabic. Indeed the incredible Byzantine structure is dominated by a 360-degree panoramic view of the Hudson River Valley, which the artist painted so beautifully in his heyday.
I suppose that the early birth pangs of America’s Gilded Age influenced the sensibilities of Mr. Church, for in much the same way that the Newport Rhode Island “cottages” look like European mausoleums, Church's whim to insert foreign sensuality and drama into his dreamcastle resulted in what you see above. In truth, I must personally admit that I find Church’s home ostentatious, pretentious and frankly absurd in its total lack of charm and authenticity. So if I had my druthers, I’d live at Giverny and paint as a colorist instead of a tonalist, which incidentally is what I do (sans la maison tres charmante). Interestingly, by the time Church’s lavish home was completed in 1876, the painter’s popularity had already begun to wane. He devoted much of the remainder of his life to decorating his beloved dreamhome, and perhaps his time would have been better spent painting outdoors instead.
Two vastly different homes, two vastly different painting styles- isn’t it ironic that both of these painters dramatically influenced and helped found two of the world’s most renowned art movements?
I personally think that the Hudson River Painters' Art is quite beautiful. However, I suppose that Impressionism clicks with me because it creates a dimension of art that a lovely photograph simply can't capture. No matter which style you prefer, there is no dearth of incredibly beautiful artwork in both of these schools.
Impressionist,
Claude Monet,
Paul Cezanne,
Frederic Edwin Church,
Hudson River School,
tonalism,
Dreamhomes
