Post-Impressionism:
Moving towards more
personal interpretations.
ABSTRACTION
EXPRESSION
FANTASY

Toulouse-Lautrec Portrait of Van Gogh Van Gogh Self-portrait
Van Gogh Portrait

Van Gogh: Potato Eaters
Empathy with a brush without clients.

Eastern Influence.
Van Gogh The Blooming Plumtree

Van Gogh: Patch of Grass
Van Gogh Patch of Grass
Impressionist’s influence could not restrain personal expression.

Van Gogh Sunflowers

Psychological attachment
to color.
Van Gogh
Café Terrace at Night

Toulouse-Lautrec: Subjects from Paris night life.

Toulouse-Lautrec Moulin Rouge Patronage
Personal and social deformities.

The Entertainers of Lautrec’s world.

Lautrec: Toilet
Degas The Bath
Candid moments
Unusual views
Lautrec The Toilet

Lautrec: Two Half-naked Women

Lautrec Bed

Lautrec
Nobility in search
of another nobility?
Lautrec: Portrait of Justine Dieuhl

Gauguin: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
A search for a reality beneath appearances.

Shapes and Colors
For their own sake.
Gauguin: Les Alyscamps, Arles

Gauguin: Swineherd

Why so flat
& stylized?
Gauguin: Spirit of the Dead Watching
The “Noble Savage”.
Portrayal of the significance of reality.

“…if you see a blue tree in the forest
and you like the color, paint it all blue!”
Paying homage to color for its own sake.
Gauguin The White Horse

Photograph of Gauguin
The Great Escape
From Convention.
Gauguin: Self-Portrait

Controlled arrangements of form and color.
Seurat: Sunday Afternoon

Art Takes From Science
Chevreul was a French chemist who
restored old tapestries. During his
restorations of tapestries he noticed that
the only way to restore a section properly
was to take into account the influence of
the colors around the missing wool; he
could not produce the right hue unless he
recognized the surrounding dyes.
Chevreul discovered that two colors
juxtaposed, slightly overlapping or very
close together, would have the effect of
another color when seen from a distance.
The discovery of this phenomenon
became the basis for the Pointillist
technique of the Neoimpressionist
painters.
Neo-Impressionism/Pointillism/Divisionism
Seurat Profile

Cezanne: Self-Portrait
Paul Cezanne: The Father Of Modern Art

Cezanne: Still-life With Apples
Particulars surrender to the Universal

Cezanne: Still-life
More than one side to every story…

Cezanne The Card Players
Paying homage to the canvas; not the subjects.

Cezanne: Mt. St. Victoire
Spatial illusion in mutation.
Perceptual rules of nature no
longer serve as the guide.

Wanda’s Quote
“We have to reconnect to that wild stream of creativity; and
again I think that education has practically banished
creativity because we've so siphoned it through a tunnel of
the rational that you're fortunate if you can come out at the
other end with any imagination still intact; and I even speak
to graduates of our art institutions and our music
conservatories, that very often they succumb to technique
and they kill the wild spirit of the soul that has entered that
learning place in order to discipline the wildness, to find
language for it, but not to domesticate it.”
Mathew Fox

Art and plants thrive in fertile soil. For some, art is only
there for the picking. They plant and harvest endlessly,
with little thought of replenishing or rotating the crop.
But there are those artists and patrons who replenish, and
in so doing, harvest a crop rich in both tradition and insight.
Their soil encourages new growth and a mutation of endless
Art & Plants varieties of new visual and tactile experiences.
And then there are those who plant a new variety of seed
which germinates to become esoteric concepts. Their soil
bears abundant fruit, rich in verbal, philosophical, social
and political pronouncements for a chosen few. This crop
is not a feast for the eye or touch of a hand, for such
qualities are no longer recognized by these artist or their
followers.
© 2009Richard Nelson