New Year, New Approach

My first artistic venture for the year was a trip to San Francisco to the Impressionists exhibit at the De Young Museum. While waiting for our entry to the exhibition we treated ourselves to the paintings which "live there" year round.



My favorites are always the landscapes of the 18th and 19th centuries, those which predate color photography or photography at all. The incredible detail captured by the artists, as well as the way light is always the 'star', move me. Having tried to paint a rose which seemed to be moving to open, I am in awe of those who caught a shadow moving across a plain, or an arching rainbow. Plein Air painting in the discomfort of wind, bugs, and heat or cold is even more challenging. Some painters couched their landscapes with metaphor, symbolism, or mythology, such as one with a man clinging to the side of a cliff. He turned out to be Prometheus awaiting the eagle to pluck out his liver. My companion dubbed him the "sunbather". The painting would have been magnificent without him, though I suppose he did provide a focal point.



Inside the Impressionist traveling exhibit, were works by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Monet, Seurat, Gaugan, and a few others. Not all of the paintings were what I would term "impressionistic" but were apparently of that period. I was reminded of my first exposure to these artists in college Art History class. My instructor was showing a still life by Cezanne and pointed out the inconsistencies in perspective of the different objects in the painting. I've never been a fan of the still life, and at 18 was not appreciative of a picture of mundane objects which appeared to be painted by someone who "didn't even know how to do perspective correctly." The professor explained that an artist has to know the rules in order to break them and that what made Cezanne so remarkable was that he had taken those unremarkable items and by breaking the rules of perspective and disturbing the 'eye' of the observer, he had made them almost vibrate with life. His 'still' life was not at all still. It made me look at a lot of art differently. It doesn't mean I always like things which defy convention, but I do try to look at them from different 'Perspectives'