Art Styles & Impressions

Artists work in a variety of colors, styles and media. Painters may use acrylics, oil paints, or watercolors, and may paint on a canvas, paper, or use mixed media supplies. When we think of the the great painters we often look at the French Impressionists. Painters like Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Gauguin all helped make art what it is today. As impressionists, they used color extensively, and the majority of impressionism focused on outdoor scenes. The term Impressionism derives from Caude Monet's painting "Impression: Sunrise" (shown here). A title was needed in a hurry for the catalogue of the exhibition in 1874. Monet suggested simply Impression, and the catalog editor, Renoir's brother Edouard, added an explanatory Sunrise.

Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities. Impressionism often accentuates the effects of the passage of time. Using ordinary subject matter, Impressionism adds the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception, while focusing on unusual visual angles.

Another  style of art commonly seen is pop art. Artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein changed the way we think of  and classify art. Andy Warhol was called the "Prince of pop Art", and in 1968 he famously coined the phrase  "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." From 1962 on Andy Warhol started making silkscreen prints of famous personalities like Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. The quintessence of Andy Warhol art was to remove the difference between fine arts and the commercial arts used for magazine illustrations, comic books, record albums or advertising campaigns. Andy Warhol once expressed his philosophy in one poignant sentence: "When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums".

Roy Lichtenstein became famous for his benday dots and the comic book appearance of his artwork. Adding word bubbles to his artwork was his finishing touch. Roy Lichtenstein's first work to feature the large-scale use of hard-edged figures and Benday Dots was” Look Mickey”(featured here) in 1961. This artwork design came from a challenge from one of his sons, who pointed to a Mickey Mouse comic book and said; "I bet you can't paint as good as that, eh, Dad?" That year Roy Lichtenstein began hiding images of comic strip figures (such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Bugs Bunny) in his paintings.

Lichtenstein explains his artwork this way:"Abstract Expressionists put things down on the canvas and responded to what they had done, to the color positions and sizes. My style looks completely different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same; mine just don't come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's."