Back in February sometime, something occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of before; the style of art that I feel most comfortable creating is closest to that of an impressionist artist. Even digitally, I prefer to create a rough, estimations of shapes and colours before refining them, which led me to begin reading and researching several styles of impressionist art in the hopes to further my own style.
The origins of impressionistic painting as we know it, can be traced back to France. The painting style was named sarcastically by an unimpressed critic after viewing Monet’s “Impression”. There have been many famous impressionist painters throughout history, artists such as Renoir, Degas, Manet, Cezanne and van Gogh to name a few.
The stylistic brush strokes of artist’s like Monet or van Gogh are easily identifiable and for me, really champion the impressionist movement but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate other styles like that of Paul Cornoyer and Edouard Manet. Whilst researching these artists I really began to appreciate the art movement and realism began feeling boring to me. Why strive to create something that can be photorealistic when you can create something that a photo cannot?
I took great interest in reading about William Dargie’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II which was dubbed his ‘Wattle Painting’ due to her Norman Hartnell mimosa gold tulle dress being adorned with sparkling golden wattle motifs. Dargie painted two replicas of this painting before painting a further third especially for the queen after she requested a personal copy. The painting was a resounding success and evoked great patriotism from the Australian people due to several factors; Dargie being an Australian himself, the Queen being the first reigning monarch to visit their shores and the Golden Wattle being their national flower.
This painting has impressionist-like qualities and a graceful warmth has been captured by Dargie; this is no uncaring monarch, this is a beautiful, young, relatable human being. His style of painting is gorgeous and one that I could only dream of emulating one day.
Taking inspiration from all of these artists, I decided to create my own Impressionist inspired pieces. The first of which was a self portrait and I think it’s interesting to see that I went into this piece with impressionism in mind and by the time I had finished it, it almost resembles a strange pointillism type piece. I struggled to get away from the way I over refine my paintings to try to make them look realistic and lost a lot of the character we can see in the first picture here. It was an interesting experiment and one of my first few oil paintings and I feel I learnt a lot about the medium whilst creating it.
The second impressionist style painting I attempted was that of the crow above but I have already written about this in a previous blog post so won’t go into it too much here. It was quite a quick study from a photo reference and I found myself slipping into my old habit of overworking the paint and had to bring it back by adding bolder colours.
Overall I have learnt a lot during this research and experimentation and feel that Impressionism has inspired me greatly. It’s quite possibly my favourite movement now, even more so after dabbling in creating my own pieces and realising how hard it is to capture the impression of something without over painting and losing the artistry. You could say that Impressionism left an impression on me…
Denis George 
Leave a comment