From Realism to Impressionism
The history of art movements is like a focus changing from outside world to inside world. It shifts from realism to impressionism to abstract. At mid seventeen century, when realists constructed its complicated hierarchy all the way up, a group of artists starts a new way to establish their own exhibition. They wanted to create a modern art that capturing the rapid pace of contemporary life and the fleeting conditions of light, which is called impressionism. The interesting thing is that photography came to a birth at the same time. As French History painter Paul Delaroche once declared, “From today, painting is dead.” after he encounter Daguerreotype. This technology challenge accelerates the development and popularity of impressionism.
So for today, as the photography technology has been well developed, are we going to search some new impressionism technology to help us express our feeling of the rapid contemporary life?
Image on the top is an old art work from my school time. It paints a sequence of “brush strokes” onto a blank pixel canvas. The brush picks up the original color from the original image.
When mentioned impressionism, I always think up the rain, since I lived in Seattle for 5 years where I always feel the rain add a filter to our real world. I start searching the rainy images and luckily found this awesome photo taken by Derek Olson is a rainy evening. Rain is made by line stroke that rotating about thirty degrees. I tried to give road a blurred and soft touching, so I used rectangles with varied sizes and opacity .5. The shop window in the original photo gives me a block feeling, so I came up the idea that make it all covered by blocks with relevant larger sizes to make some color stands out more and give it a glowing feeling. I use circle stroke on the lights with Gaussian blurring. Rainy night always gives me nasty and cold feeling, but I feel relaxing and calm when seeing this photo, so I decide to decorate the trees with stars to create a little bit holiday mood.
