Post-Impressionism

Purpose: To gain a basic understanding about the Post-Impressionism Art Movement and to identify Artists who work(ed) in this style.

The Post-Impressionist movement began in the late 1800s as a way to capture emotions expressively and with unique style. It was a semi-abstracted form of art that used a lot of symbolism. The goal of the movement was to move away from realism in order to capture the emotion of a scene or object. There were several artists that were especially prevalent in this movement including Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Paul Cézanne. Van Gogh is most famous for his painting Starry Night. Van Gogh was determined to put personal expression into his works using very rugged brushstrokes. Cezanne’s basis was a new way of studying nature, using his form of art to capture something that was not true to life but rather true to the structure of always changing colors. Gauguin was also interested in not capturing true photographic realism but rather the feelings invoked by certain color schemes.

Voorhies, James. "Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History." Post-Impressionism. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d. Web. 08 Mar. 2014.

In doing this assignment I learned that post-impressionism was not at all what I thought it was. The thoughts and ideas behind more expressive art and why the movement became what it was really fascinated me. The specific idea of pointillism and how using small bits of color next to each other could fool the eye into mixing the colors together. Seeing all these different techniques made me think about my own style of painting and how I wanted to approach my still life painting. I really like the looser styles used in the post-impressionist works and I'm eager to try some more expressive style of painting soon!