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A Wooden Landscape With Travelers

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From the beginning of time, art has always existed. Art came in many forms; from painting, to drawing, to sculpting. However, none of these forms of art seemed to withhold the same techniques throughout time. A way to describe art is to say that it is dynamic. Art is always changing, whether it the style of art, the techniques, or the medium. Art seems to evolve as time as gone on, from artist to artist, from region to region. In the seventeenth century, the focus of painting was very realistic. Artists wanted to create an illusion of real life through their medium and thus they focused a lot on detail and perspective in order to convey real life to the viewer. However, with the dynamic nature of painting, the idea of realism began to change …show more content…

The seventeenth century painting, A Wooden Landscape with Travelers, by Joris van der Haagan was a great example of a work that was meant to be an allusion of picture. The detail of this work is extreme, with every leaf to every blade of grass carefully painted separately in order to build up the illusion that it was real life. This painting is nothing new of the time because many artists at this time were focused on the extreme realism of art. However, as time went on, artists like George Bellows began to work in a new style that used a looser, more careless, style of brushstrokes. This technique that Bellows used is known as colorito. By examining his painting up close, the viewer would notice that the people in his landscape are simply quick brushstrokes of paint, made to look realistic from afar, but simply lines and splotches from a closer viewpoint. Unlike Hagaan’s painting, where everything is so finely tuned and perfected, there are imperfections and fewer details in Bellows’ …show more content…

Hagaan painted in a very tuned manner, focusing on minute details, while Bellows used a colorito technique with loose brushstrokes, creative the illusion of detail from afar. Both artists utilized light and shadow in order to make certain parts of their scenes to stand out to the viewers eye and pop out details where they wanted them to be seen. Likewise, each artist focused on using dull colors; Hagaan kept a consistent greener tone of spring in his scene to evoke happiness and curiosity, while Bellows had a more consistent tone of blue which brought out a sense of winter and melancholy to his scene. Both of these artists showed in their works that art is an ever-changing dynamic experiment where the minds of each individual artist get to decide what they want to express to the audience. There are so many techniques and styles of art, and the combination of those components that the artist chooses is what sets them apart from one

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