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Charles-François Daubigny - 1817 – 1878
Charles-François Daubigny - 1817 – 1878
Remarks:
With this painting, Daubigny takes the idea of painting on 'en plein air' (out in the open) and, working over a dark brown ground, he creates a range of subtle effects.
At first glance this painting appears basic and straightforward, but, on close inspection, it reveals a range of subtle and sophisticated effects.
The dark warm ground is established throughout the picture and then is heightened with both warm and cool colours to create a dominant mid tone. For example, the bottom half of the sky is painted over with variations of green dominated by cerulean blue (a light green blue like turquoise blue). This green is picked out with dark patches of raw umber to create dark clouds and complement the dabs of pink and white around the moon.
The bottom of the sky is blended loosely with visible brushstrokes to create a soft layering effect of purple-grey over the ground.
The purple-grey acts as a foil, and a cool version of the cerulean blue sky.
The horizon is painted in as a very dark green, almost black which divides the two parts of the picture in two, and which moves from the background space of the distant horizon – a kind of spatial back marker, through to the mid-foreground where there are clumps of trees on the right of the picture.
This visual marker effect is mirrored in a reflection which provides a soft and broken version of the trees in inversion.
The foreground of the picture uses the same brown ground with the lightest version of the green blue colour in the sky as well as dabs of pure yellow and pink to suggest the lighting effect of the moon catching the surface of the water.
There are several areas of highlight throughout the picture: on the edge of the water, where a broken white light suggests surface meeting edge of the bank; along the top of the bank towards the background where the ground is called by the moonlight; and in small splashes around the foreground in the centre of the picture where the moonlight is caught on the surface of the pond.
The moon itself also acts as a focal point and the highest brightest value of the picture. It is a disc of pure white, possibly smudged with a hint of yellow.
The moon immediately attracts the attention of the viewer, who looks past all the other lighting effects, and looks directly at it.
The moon is placed just above centre, and the moon pulls the viewer towards the deeper space for the painting.
This helps to create volume in the painting.
Lots of different techniques have been used throughout this picture: from the modulation of a warm ground set at the mid tone, to give the middle of the painting some variation of light and dark values, as well as some variations of warm and cool colours.
Visible brushstrokes have been used to create a rough, worked-up surface, and also in individual patches to create highlight effects, for example the dabs of pure colour to indicate the reflection of the moon on the water.
Layering and glazing effects have been used to allow one colour to overlay and modulate another, or as rough covering so that one colour can still shine through another. For example, on the brushwork of the sky where patches of green and blue are loosely brushed over the sky, covering the warm browns, pinks and purples previously painted in.
Overall, the atmosphere is established through the domination of the mid tone which is broken into warm and cool versions.
The two essential values of the painting are the slightly acid green, brown colour - which is a set of variations around colours mixed with yellow; and the covered underpainting, mid tone and cerulean blue. All of which exist at the halfway point between the highlights and the dark greens of the foliage.
Finally, it is important to note that although there doesn't seem to be much drawing, there is actually a strong structure to this painting with the use of repetition and notation through reflected elements and vertical markers.
For example, the family of ducks in the lower left corner create five small visual markers to establish the plane of the water pulling towards the viewer; the single leading tree slightly to the right of the centre, and its inversion, as a reflection, and the larger single clump of inverted foliage in reflection towards the right foreground.
Each of these acts as a spatial marker pulling the surface of the water forward or pushing the background of the painting further back into deeper space.
Albert Bierstadt – 1830 – 1902
Albert Bierstadt – 1830 – 1902
The Metropolitan Museum of Art 09.214.1. Merced River, Yosemite Valley (1866)
Remarks:
This is a large-scale and epic image which reminds the viewer today of the backdrop from a science fiction film of a visit to a new and surprising world made, on a vast scale.
In many ways, that was intention of Bierstadt, the artist, when this was first exhibited 150 years ago.
This is a view of Yosemite Valley in California for people who had never been to California or the National Parks there. It was shown in New York to crowds of city dwellers who remained resolutely on the east coast of America in their great cities and towns.
The value of this painting was to remind Americans of the awe-inspiring scale and enormity of the country they now inhabited and could call their own.
As such it has clear value for the promotion of "the wonders of nature". To achieve this awe-inspiring picture postcard image, Bierstadt has relied on traditional 20th-century effects and used a variety of techniques from working with large soft brushes and rags to establish modulations of the initial brown underpainting, through careful layering of paint with glazes and washes to build up subtle gradations of colour.
For example, moving from the grey, blue and purple of the background through to the thicker and more detailed paint in the foreground. There is also some 'wet on wet' technique as well as impasto strokes and build up (thick paint) in the trees and the rocks of the foreground.
The centre of the painting is dominated by the mountain, which it seems is enveloped in the mists and the atmosphere of the background, and the deeper space of the background.
This mountain is shown as having an enormous mass. The shape of the mountain is echoed by the combined group of trees in the foreground.
These trees look like a smaller skeletal version of the mountain and they are broken up and seem to lack proper foliage, making the contour and shape of the mountain, but lacking its obvious enormity, bulk and solidity.
The reflections of the rocks in the lake seem rather to emphasise the vastness of the structure of the rock than to suggest a reflection, it is almost as though we are looking through the water to see the rest of the rock which exist beneath the surface.
Bierstadt is suggesting these rocks are even more vast if we can understand and appreciate their totality.
Whilst the colours are muted overall, to place an emphasis on detail drawing, the foreground displays a range of warm, rich greens, reds and browns which pull the foreground space towards the viewer.
Claude Monet - 1840 – 1926
Claude Monet - 1840 – 1926
Remarks:
Ernest Lawson - 1873 – 1939
Ernest Lawson - 1873 – 1939
Canadian-American
Remarks :
Painted at the turn of the century – the very late 19th and very early 20th century, this painting has an over laboured feel.
Every inch of the surface appears to be worked and laden with paint.
This sense of the arduous manufacture of the painting is reinforced through the detail of the drawing which features rows of spindly wooden trees and their inverted reflections as dark lines which run through the cold frozen water.
Put simply, there is a lot of thickly painted detail all over the surface of the painting.
In the foreground, there are more saplings which struggle to reach out through the snow and each of these has been carefully delineated and drawn through lots of painted layers.
The background is a mesh of thick and impasto (thick) paint-work which has been dabbed into place with a stiff brush to create an solid effect of a "painted surface".
This style of painting seems to benefit from, and be the last word in, the long tradition of academic painting and rigorous academic training which means that by the late 19th century, artists had achieved their goal to be able to render nature as they saw it.
To give this painting an effect and purpose, and to separate it from the new emerging art form of photography, which could capture the appearance of nature much quicker, some specialist aspect of painting was required to lift the picture.
Therefore, the artist had to make some gesture towards art and its potential to achieve visual interest with "painting effects".
Consequently, visible brushstrokes are used to reinforce the idea of the image as a painted picture, rather than to suggest or convey emotion or the personal response of the artist to the world. In this way the marks and physical application of the paint is self conscious and worked.
Layers of paint are used to allow the image to achieve the appearance of lighting effects. But this is done in a 'text book' fashion which is applied to the subject as a readymade option rather than being found through the process.
There don't appear to be any new discoveries in the process of the painting, it all seems a little predetermined.
The image appears to degrade under typical lighting effects, so that elements of highlight or dark tone can be picked out, or seen in simplified forms through the direct applications of paint.
There is also a range of colour-work within the picture that gives an overall impression of a generalised blandness and yet, on closer inspection, the surface shows that blocks and areas of real individual colours have been left visible. These include purple, burnt sienna, viridian and bright red.
That these bright individual stabs of colour are not immediately noticeable, shows the quality of the craft of the workmanship on show here. This is a highly achieved but possibly run of the mill painting.
Pierre Bonnard 1867 — 1947
Pierre Bonnard 1867 — 1947
Remarks:
Bonnard paints in an unusual fashion. He uses underpainting and then builds up small patches of colour which he modulates with areas of light and dark additions.
Bonnard works from light to dark and then adds the opposite value across across the area he has just established. So that a transition from light to dark then has a patch of light colour applied over the top to disrupt or enliven the transition.
For example, in the stripes underneath the window it is possible to see how the orange-brown stripes have been worked over a dark green colour and then revivified with dabs of lighter and more pink versions of the brown paint.
Similarly, the purple stripes between these orange stripes have also been worked over the same dark grey and these have then also been worked over with a lighter blue colour.
Bonnard uses this approach of working over each area of the painting in detail and then reworking the same area through light to dark with the addition of further more saturated colours.
Bonnard creates paintings which can seem laboured, highly ornamented and yet at the same time somewhat dull because of their 'all over' feel.
It is as though he has done too much, too often and in too many places. It is the same throughout.
With all the intensity of colour on offer it is possible and traditional to read these paintings as private and intense visions of harmonious relationships, however, when doing so, these paintings can take on an unseemly or distasteful aspect.
There is though, an alternative reading which suggests that these paintings are actually the depictions of moments of mental cruelty and spite rather than calm and relaxation.
With this second reading in mind, the colour takes on a new value which is gives them an almost psychotic intensity.
Under this reading, the colours become expressionist, uneven and almost hallucinogenic.
Traditionally, Bonnard was seen as creating scenes of private love between himself and his wife. His paintings were thought to be scenes of beautified and intimate domesticity.
Recent research however, has indicated that Bonnard and his wife did not enjoy a loving relationship: there had been another lover who had subsequently committed suicide, but who was ever present as a terrible memory and a reminder of the unhappiness they were trapped in in catholic marriage.
These two clear readings are incompatible and make the paintings open to the completely different interpretation of colour, stroke and composition.
Either colour is the height of sensual pleasure and intimacy, or it is the work as new dislocated and agonised existence.
Similarly, the cut-off, cropped compositions, have always been described as indebted to Japanese printmaking.
But they can also be read as either brief and intimate moments – what the artist saw on looking up in a happy and loving moment of existence with a lifelong wife or,
Instead, a chaotic and discordant moment of mental torture stretching out into a larger and unbalanced existence without redemption.
Which is the correct view?
It is interesting that a painting can lend itself to two such separate readings
That two in depth interpretations can be sustained merely through the evidence of the application of the paint, use of colour and the structure of the compositions. There is no other conclusive documentary evidence
Are these paintings completely calm, relaxed and at ease or, are they entirely set in a vicious silence and fraught with hatred and neuroses?
David Bomberg - 1890 - 1957
David Bomberg - 1890 - 1957
Remarks :
This painting is reminiscent of the painting by Constable of the view from Hove to Shoreham.
I will focus on this painting again later, as it is important for the work I want to do.
There are a clear range of techniques in this picture including over painting and underpainting, wet on wet techniques, one touch painting and the use of discordant and contrasting colours to create space. Visible brushstrokes with minimal blending are also used to create an immediacy in the painting effects.
There is also a liveliness and vibrancy in the way that the paint has been added to the painting layer by layer.
Willem de Kooning - 1904 – 1997
Willem de Kooning - 1904 – 1997
1977
The North Atlantic Light, 1977, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam
Remarks:
Willem de Kooning was a famous Abstract Expressionist American artist. He was a member of the Abstract Expressionist group along with artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.
In the late 1970s, de Kooning began a new series of paintings which many see as a miraculous and important late set of works.
Although de Kooning is associated with Abstract Expressionism, his work is never really entirely abstract and always retains elements that refer to observations of things seen in the world.
He called himself the "slipping glimpser". de Kooning meant that he slipped thorough painting techniques and post cubist space in his paintings from one briefly seen image to the next.
From this we can see that there is a mixture of abstract elements, figurative elements and considerable emphasis on paint handling and brushwork in his paintings.
To achieve these late paintings (done late in his career), de Kooning created a special mix of oil paint with extensive additional oil elements mixed in.
This special mix allowed him to achieve very long brushstrokes. He applied colours, one over the other in large and smaller brushstrokes, often using 'wet on wet' techniques and sometimes using 'wet on dry' to achieve textured and built up grounds.
Sometimes new brushstrokes were applied over old ones to cancel out previous painting and sometimes, they were employed to add or enhance what was already on the surface of the painting.
Sometimes, paint was shown to us as the result of a gesture or form the movement of the artist's brush.
Sometimes paint was shown to the viewer as a thick and glutinous substance which was capable of creating splashes, drips and "liquid marks" as the product of its interaction with the speed of application, gravity and the surface of the picture.
For de Kooning, paint could be transparent and translucent, or it could be solid and opaque with brushstrokes achieving an almost physical presence within the space of a painting.
In the painting 'North Atlantic light', de Kooning seems to be suggesting that there is a big space towards the top third of the painting and that there is a broken or rough surface, possibly the sea, or a landscape that moves from below the deep space of the top third through the middle of the painting towards the foreground at the bottom of the picture.
This space is broken and mediated by light and dark brushstrokes.
The darker brushstrokes tend to be smaller in scale than the lighter ones, there is for example a range of white brushstrokes which are made with a thicker and broader strokes than the darker ones made in blue and crimson.
'Untitled' 1976
Around the same time, in the mid-late 1970s, de Kooning painted this work which does not have a figurative allusion in the title. It is simply called "untitled”.
There seems to be some difference in size and scale between the foreground and background which is made up of two broad areas.
In the background there is a separated crimson area of brushstrokes which seems to be replicated by a white version in the foreground. The white version of the brushstrokes is larger and more solidly painted.
This white area seems to come towards the viewer, whereas the Crimson version in the background is broken up and less distinct from the background.
For example, it merges somewhat with the surrounding colours as in the lower half where it is surrounded by a cold scarlet red colour.
There are a series of brushstrokes which have allowed dripping and splashing across the bottom half of the painting and these include white, dark blue, pink and grey and crimson strokes.
Many of the strokes have been applied with wet paint over a white background with some vigour and speed
This has resulted in dripping and splashing. There is also some record of the activity of the painting.
For example, as with some of the strokes towards the right-hand side which feature colours that have been worked over others while still wet.
This live mixing on the canvas creates a degree of agitated blending.
At these points, the colour appears matted and indistinct which contrast with some of the clear colour zones in the top part of the painting and in the right top part of the painting.
The colours towards the top are somewhat sickly in hue and feature two versions of yellow: one over a read area, in the extreme left, top corner of the painting; and one over a dark green colour.
This second yellow is more red in character and darker and deeper as a colour. It sits as a background behind the cold reds and greens present in the top half of the painting.
There is a difference between the overall impression of the colour regime of painting and its individual elements.
Despite giving a warm glow when seen as a totality and despite using lots of bright warm colours, the painting is largely made up of isolated cool elements. For example, the blues and the crimsons are all cold when considered in isolation.
There is a considerable facility for paint handling on display in this picture.
There are is a great range of different marks made and vigourous application of paint.
It is not just a crippled image though, the image is composed as one image which is whole and complete.
As a painted image, the picture retains its sense of its own identity and cohesion.
The painting does not tell us anything about the world other than the means of, and the process of its manufacture. It is an elegant solution without an underlying cause or problem.
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