Formal Critique: Jacob-Abraham-Camille Pissarro

The work is very smooth and fluid making it appear much like a photograph. The oil is not built up on top of itself keeping it very two dimensional. The colors vary between dark and light throughout the painting. In the top right corner, the sun, outside the painting, shining down, aluminates the castle and also the lone tree at the bottom left corner. Besides the back cliff, the rest of the painting is in shadow and displayed in a much more melancholy tone. The colors that Cole focuses on, to display the sharp contrast between rock and nature, are mostly dark greens and gold. The striking blue of the river stands out dramatically from the rest of the colors and draws the eye after the initial citing. The grey in the cloud is the only place where I can find that shade of gray in the work, and it sets itself apart from the snow white clouds in the background. The color helps draw the eye immediately to the castle on the hill. My eyes then fallow the flow of the river down to the tree, which is illuminated by a beam of sunlight.

Impressionism is an artistic style of painting that originated in France in the 1870s. This style of painting attempts to capture an experience or emotion opposed depicting a scene accurately. Every impressionistic painter has a distinct method of rendering as well as their own distinct set of qualities that reflect the artist themselves. For instance, The Basket Chair by Berthe Morisot and The Orange Trees by Gustave Caillebotte are two impressionist works of art of oils on canvas that contrast in many ways. These two paintings will be compared side by side with an in depth approach comparing the artist’s personal status in society, modernism’s role in the piece, and the execution of composition.

The painting depicts a singular mountain with trees and abstract landmasses in the foreground. The trees are placed in such a way that they seem to echo the shape of the mountain. This is an example of Cézanne’s attempt to created a structured composition out of the scenes that he observes in nature. Cézanne was not depicting nature as it was, but rather he was, as he called it, making “a construction after nature” (Stokstad,1013). This is one idea that lead Cézanne away from the impressionists, who were more concerned with reproducing on canvas exactly what their eyes perceived. Another thing that was different between Cézanne’s style and the impressionists’ was the way that he applied paint to the canvas. For example, in this painting, the trees and land in the foreground are loosely painted in; their forms are created by an amalgamation of colored blotches. The blotches of color often bleed into each other, and the forms that they represent begin to dissolve. The image is flattened by the ambiguous forms in several spot in this painting, creating a disruption in the illusionistic space and bring the viewer’s focus on the inherently flat surface of the painting. The most effective technique that Cézanne employs in his attempt at depicting space in this painting is atmospheric perspective. Coloring the mountain with the same shades of blue

Vincent Van Gogh is one of the most infamous and influential artists of all time. When I saw that Van Gogh’s painting “Olive Trees With Yellow Sky and Sun” was on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, I knew I had to choose it for this paper. Before doing the research for this assignment, I didn’t know much about Vincent Van Gogh, but the fact that pretty much everyone knows his name and recognizes him as a huge part of art history, it made me naturally really curious about him.

The texture of the canvas works very well with the subject matter portrayed in the painting. The grassy hill side and the leaves of the trees are especially complimented by the canvas. It makes the leaves feel like they are slightly moving, this combined with the lack of detail itself the leaves. This is contrasted nicely with the very detailed renderings of the trunks and branches of the trees, the

Pissarro lived in St. Thomas until age 12, then his parents sent him to a boarding school in France. In Paris he studied at various academic institutions (including the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Academie Suisse) and under a succession of masters such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, and Charles-François Daubigny; Pissarro eventually fell in with a group of young artists, including Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, their work was not accepted in by the French artistic establishment

The tone used in Vincent’s painting were a mixed of warm and cool colours to convey his emotions. In order to achieve the dramatic mood of this painting, Vincent used white and yellow oil paints, which marries well with the blue and green to create the night sky.

Vincent Van Gogh was a master of the Post-Impressionist art movement; he created works that conveyed strong emotions through the simplest of elements. In Avenue of Poplars in Autumn, Van Gogh again shows his mastery of brushwork and color, giving the viewer a scene of a person walking from a home near dusk down an avenue lined with spindly poplars. Made in October of 1884, the painting seems to accurately reflect the season with red and brown leaves stubbornly adhering to the trees. The initial feeling of this piece is one of peace and calm. Autumn is a time for being with family and avoiding the cold. But the longer the viewer looks, the more they realize that this painting seems to show the opposite of a serene scene, creating an uneasy atmosphere. The feeling only grows when they see the shadows that lick the edges of the trees, the bar-like ruts in the road, and lone figure that walks steadily away from the empty house. In Avenue of Poplars in Autumn, Van Gogh strives to create a forbidding and frightening atmosphere through dark and contrasting colors, limited space, skewed balance, straight and diagonal lines, movement, and the subject matter of the painting, all to represent his emotional response to the scene.

While the painters after the Impressionism period were collectively called the “Post-Impressionists,” the label is quite reductive. Each artist had their own unique style, from Seurat’s pointillism to Signac’s mosaic-like divisionism, Cezanne, Émile Bernard, and others. These artists were all connected in that they were reacting to the aesthetics of Impressionism. Two of the more influential painters from this movement were Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, who aimed to connect with viewers on a deeper level by access Nature’s mystery and meaning beyond its superficial, observable level. However, each artist’s approach to achieving this goal was different. In close examination of Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait (Dedicated to Paul Gauguin) and Paul Gauguin’s Self-Portrait with Portrait of Émile Bernard (Les misérables), one may clearly see the two artists’ contrasting styles on display.

“Under”). One could mistake that the focal point is the little figure under the birch tree who is a priest. However, the main point in this landscape is all about the birches. The reason why one could say so is because of all the visual elements such as: the birches are in the middle of the painting; they are also the most lighted objects in the painting (light is shining in the form of an oval) (National Gallery). Due to the levels of lightning one can see that the picture is divided into three horizontal parts: the top (dark, but not as dark as the bottom of the painting); the middle is the lightest; and the bottom is the darkest. This means that he used what he learned about the Dutch style and mixed it with his personal style thus we have a whole new way of seeing his point of view.

The next art element that is demonstrated in this painting is time and motion. The think strokes of the leaves on the tree make it looks as though a wind is blowing through the streets of France. The pedestrians in the street demonstrate an element of time and motion because they appear to have been caught mid-stride on the way to their destinations. The server in the café, as well as his customers, show motion because they are moving and having conversations amongst themselves.

We can also see the use of black shades to create a hole at the bottom part of the rock. With his excellent use of colors, we can identify the good, healthy and green grass from the bad, unhealthy, brown grasses. Looking beyond the main focus of the painting, he uses colors to separate the sky from the land in the background creating a solid form of perspective on the painting. He also uses colors to create water forms as seen behind the young character. Now, for the sky, he uses shades of white to magnificently differentiate the thick clouds from the light ones. He also uses this to create a source to light to the whole area. All these put together creates a splendid, realistic and familiar atmosphere for the viewers to relate with.

• The focal point of the painting is the sun-drenched valley and river. The emphasis comes from the diagonal of the tree to the left that directs the view of the scene down the valley toward the farmland.

Many elements and principles are portrayed in this art piece. To begin with, the first thing I see and grabs my attention is the swirling wind. Rhythm and Movement can be seen and it creates a flow to the rest of the painting in which leads your eyes to follow along the path of the swirl and brings you to the next subject. It allowed me to view the art piece up to down and left to right, as I started from the swirl to the stars

The grass was spread out through the whole painting. If you looked hard enough you can see flowers of pink and red growing within the grass. There were spots of yellow in the grass making the grass look as though it was dying. Then the painting had a patch of grass that had a very vibrant shade of green, that made the grass look so alive. The grass had a willowy quality that may have suggested that there may have been a breeze.