Thursday, July 9, 2015

Painting the Night

Józef Pankiewicz (1866-1940) Warsaw by Night
Reading the chapter in Harold Speed for tomorrow's book club post, I was struck with this line: "Effects such as twilight, moonlight, or even sunlight were seldom attempted by the older painters, at any rate in their figure subjects."

Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice
"All the lovely tone arrangements that nature presents in these more unusual aspects are a new study, and offer unlimited new material to the artist."

Walter Everett, Lovers in the Garden
If we can put ourselves back in 1917 when he wrote that, we can imagine what an exciting time it was to be an artist. Anyone with their eyes open could hardly ignore the contribution that Impressionism and photography were making to the older traditions of painting.

I believe we're in a similar age of inspiring cross-pollination, with stimulating new ideas arriving from the worlds of animation, visual effects, digital art, and photography.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh Man! This coincides remarkably with Howard Lyon's post over on Muddy Colors, using 3-d models from a life masque of lincoln and a model to get a good representation of the president! http://muddycolors.blogspot.com/2015/07/painting-lincoln-part-1.html

Anonymous said...

because of the mixing of digital medium...

Jim Douglas said...

I'm blown away by the Józef Pankiewicz painting. The edges are so soft, yet there is weight to the architecture. And the carriage has hardly any detail, just perfectly placed soft shapes that invite us and assist us to fill in the details ourselves. I also enjoy how much chromatic color there is in the lamp lighting; this is much more than a value study. Just wonderful.

Robert J. Simone said...

And let's not forget the contribution of the modern plein air movement with so many talented painters who have taken to painting nocturnes. It's amazing the moods that are conveyed by those artists who know how to use just the right amount of abstraction....break a line in the right spot, lose an edge, omit detail.

Living in Florida this is the time of year to paint lots of nocturnes. Weather is much more tolerable at night. Painted a moody bridge scene last night with lights reflecting on the water. I was entertained by a pod of dolphins who were agitating a couple of fishermen in a small boat. The kept circling them and splashing and in general ruining the fishing!

My Pen Name said...

whistler, i recall also had le coq's memory training