Impressionist Painting
Exhibition TextTitle: Back Alley Sunset
Month of Completion: September 2016 Size: 60.96 x 91.44 Medium: Acrylic on Canvas This acrylic painting was inspired by the Impressionist style of Armand Guillaumin, depicting the sunset as seen across the alley from my bedroom window. I chose Guillaumin to emulate not only because I was drawn to his expressive color and broad brushstrokes, but because I felt his paintings exemplified the contrast between the beautiful and the ugly that I originally wanted to paint, developing a deeper message of beauty being unspoiled by separate objects near it that we perceive to be ugly as I moved through the process of creating this piece. |
Inspiration
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When I began this painting I was very drawn to Impressionism as a movement because I have always loved the style and wanted to continue exploring that with this project. This is what led me to Armand Guillaumin, a French painter from the 19th century. While I enjoyed the style of brushwork and color, what really struck me was the interesting juxtaposition between the vibrant natural landscape and the harsh industrial elements, creating a contrast that forces the viewer to look beyond the ugliness of the smokestacks in order to see the beautiful sky behind it. I wanted to recreate that idea in my own painting, and I found the perfect subject in my own bedroom, specifically the view from my window, which faces the sunset every night, a beautiful scene, crisscrossed with wires and power lines, and studded with dull garages. While my work has sharper, more contrasting brushstrokes than Guillaumin’s, I tried to mimic his style of vibrant color and soft blending and layering of color.
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Process
I began with painting the background of the scene, the gradient in the sky. I took a few pictures of the scene I wanted to paint at different times of the day in order to get a range of colors and hues that I could draw from. I chose to paint the time of day just after the sky begins to change, when the colors are softest and lightest. The actual sun is out of the picture, but I planned to focus on highlights and shading in other elements to show where the light source is coming from (above and to the left). I used red, yellow, and blue to create a gradient for the sky. My original plan was to use this gradient as a background and simply paint the scene on top of that, but as I was working I realized that I really didn’t like the way it was coming out, it didn’t have the softness that I wanted and the colors were too bright and harsh. Instead I started to look closer at Guillaumin’s work and discovered his technique of building a gradient with patches of color layered over one another. I applied this technique to my own canvas, and discovered I could use this method much easier and quicker than trying to blend it, and I really loved the way it came out.
Next I started working on of the middle ground of the scene, specifically the house and trees against the sky. I drew on experience from past paintings of trees when I was younger to shape the groups of branches and leaves into a cohesive object, and then applied the technique I used in the background on a smaller scale. I layered multiple colors as my base, then finished with shadows and highlights. I tried to use a loose, impressionist style while still keeping it structured just enough to solidify the shape of the tree.
The house proved more difficult for me, because with any previous practice with impressionist style I had been working solely with organic, natural shapes, but now I had to demonstrate the same style with the rigid, sharp form of a building. I turned again to Guillaumin’s paintings, and began to explore this process as shown in the Experimentation section. |
ExperimentationPainting the houses and non-organic shapes in this project was the most difficult part for me, so I had to turn away from the actual painting for a while and focus on developing my technique. I examined a lot of both Guillamin’s paintings and other impressionist works to better understand the style of work. I began to paint small versions of the main house, applying different methods to each. I tried experimenting with delicate versus bold strokes, long strokes across the entire shape or short ones following the same direction
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Once I’d explored a few techniques and found one suited to me, I simply applied it on a larger scale in the actual painting, while continuing to develop the style as a whole. This part of the painting was most difficult for me, it took a very long time to find the balance I wanted between classic Impressionist brushstrokes and more realistic-style blending. Although I found myself extremely frustrated throughout the process, by the end I had managed to formulate my own style that I could use in other elements of the painting such as the garages below.
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The final element, the foreground, consists of the balcony railing from behind which I originally photographed the scene. This I made much darker than the rest because I wanted to accurately show that it was in a much different space than the rest of the painting and much closer to the viewer. I kept the railing very clean and simple because I did not want it to draw focus away from the rest of the scene but rather act as a framing element.
Once all of this was done I was content with my work, and yet it felt off to me. It was a nice enough scene but I felt that it needed something more to catch the viewer’s attention and give it more energy. Looking back over the photos I had taken of the scene, I realized that I hadn’t included the power lines. I loved the way they crisscrossed in every direction across the alley and tangled wherever they met. I used black paint to add these simple lines across the sky, which felt risky because it would have been very difficult to fix if it didn’t come out right, but in the end I think they created this dynamic energy and pulled the piece together.
Meaning |
Reflection |
The meaning of this piece lies in the juxtaposition between beauty and ugly. As a kid, I always remember being annoyed when people thought that something as small as a smokestack or cell phone tower could ‘ruin’ a beautiful scene, because to me those things were entirely separate, and there was nothing stopping you from just looking beyond those things to see the sunset behind it, and that is the message I wanted to convey with this painting. I chose the specific scene because it’s the one I have seen from my bedroom window every single day; it’s become personal to me because I’ve grown up with it and watched it change over the years, and every night I looked across the alley to the sunset beyond.
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Although this piece proved very frustrating and difficult to create, I like what resulted after overcoming that part of the process. I think that the organic elements like the sky and trees look the best because those were things I had the most experience with, and could construct the easiest, while contrastingly the buildings took much more effort for what I think was a lesser result because I haven’t really done something like that before and I found it challenging to demonstrate the same conceptual style on a form that was so rigid and sharp. In the end I think I learned a lot about Impressionistic style. Before this project, I thought that to paint with impressionism you had to use short brush marks in contrasting colors, but through this work I discovered I could also use blending and softer styles to achieve similar results, focusing on Impressionism’s objective of focusing on light and color rather than the technique.
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ACT Components
- While I already had some idea of contrasting beauty and ugliness, Guillaumin's work was what inspired me to focus more specifically on nature versus man-made.
- Through research and personal experience, I've learned that much of our society seems to be incapable of seeing the beauty beyond it's flaws and imperfections, and that subsequently I think we blame these flaws for taking the beauty out of our lives when really it never left.
- The central idea around my research was to find a way to show that beauty can be found anywhere once you accept the imperfections as part of the whole and instead focus on the beauty around it.
- While reading my research I came to the conclusion that I have always felt this way subconsciously about my surroundings, and I think this project simply allowed me to express that part of myself.