Impressionism 1860

Claude Monet - Water Lily Pond

This painting of a water lily pond is a perfect example of pure impressionism. The chosen colours represent light which is broken down into its spectrum components and recombined by the eyes into another colour when viewed from a distance. When you view Monet's painting up-close, it appears to be a choatic jumble of colours. "Impressionism was breaking the acedemic rules of painting and that was done by painting light instead of subjects."http://www.impressionism.info/info.html In pure impressionism the use of black paint was to be avoided and greys and dark tones were produced by mixing complimentary colours. Monet has used green and purple to create the illusion of blackness between the trees in the blackground. Like realism, impressionist artists painted realistic scenes but they used modern life instead of historical scenes or people. With impressionist art it was costomary to create the effect of intense colour vibration by not smoothly blending the colours and using short broken brush stroke of pure and unmixed colour. Short thick strokes of paint used to capture the essense of the subject rather than the detail. To create the willoe trees and lilies the colours have been applied side by side with very little mixture creating a vibrant surface. This makes the optical mixing of the colours occur in the eye of the viewer.