Title: Oasis
Medium: Watercolor on 140lb watercolor paper
Size: 18″ x 24″
Movement: Neo Romanticism/Abstract Expressionism
Price: $250 ($400 Framed)
Artist’s Statement –
I prefer Expressionism to Impressionism. I find some Impressionistic painters like Monet to be too muddy. I believe that Impressionism requires a quick and deliberate set of strokes. Monet looks to have overworked everything he did. I know he was trying to capture a moment in time by painting the light. I just think that his reworking and constant massaging of the paint muddied things up.
The influence for “Oasis” is from the artist Joseph Mallord William Turner. He painted a lot of landscapes, primarily looking out to sea. The subject matter was light, and often times other images like ships, rocks, or people. I find his work to be more a form of Expressionism than Impressionism. While the composition contains many Impressionistic elements like, the body of work as a whole is very Expressionistic.
Expressionistic artists sought to radically distort their subject matter to create an emotional effect or mood. This can best be found in Munch’s “The Scream”. I believe you can create that same emotional effect with an Impressionistic piece by capturing both light and movement without blotting globs of paint on the canvas.
The light should show through the layers of paint. It should not be painted on or over the underlying layers. Turner captures this in watercolor, a medium that allows for opacity. He often gets classified as a Impressionist painter when in fact he was a Romanticist. His work is arguably the FIRST abstract painter. He is also known as “The Painter of Light”. Impressionism came after Romantisism and Impressionist painters sought to capture that same light and failed. Partly because of the medium they were using and partly because they did not know when to stop working on the piece.
I’d like to think of my “Exploration” as Post Expressionism. I would like to capture the light without rendering any fully recognizable imagery. I’d like the viewer to be left to imagine what the composition is. Turner had a bit of Realist in him. A lost of his images contain recognizable elements, ships, landscapes, buildings, etc. I think the reason for this was so that the viewer could see the contrast between a recognizable image and the “impression” of light. I am hoping to impart the impression of light devoid any recognizable (at least obviously recognizable) subject matter.
