This is some of my favorite art. Really simple, colorful, and pleasurable to look at it. I like their methods as well, and believe it or not most of this art work was fairly controversial when it first arrived:

Monet:




Manet:



Morisot:


Cezanne:



Renoir:



Seurat:


and of course Van Gogh:

Kind of makes me wanting to start shooting my films in color. I've been working on black and white projects for the past year and I'm ready to move on (I still love black and white though).

I wouldn't really call Van Gogh an impressionist, he's very much just Van Gogh.

well yeah

He was influenced by the movement though, in many ways. I've heard Van Gogh referred to more as a "post-Impressionist" or expressionist.

van gogh was also poor and unaccepted his whole life, and never really saw money or fame from his paintings.

yeah. I just wanted to be a smart-ass anyway. good thread.

heh, i was wondering if someone was going to try and say van gogh wasn't a true impressionist when i saw this thread. personally i consider him very much to be one and they were certainly his peers although he is of course in a class of his own.
also g_v, no camille pissarro?? c'mon!

He's technically not an impressionist, to put it in simple terms, artists like Monet were focused on capturing the play of light on different surfaces at different times, LIGHT being the ultimate focus, I could go more into depth but I wanted to keep it simple to show that Van Gogh doesn't really fit the definition of impressionist.

Would you say that Van Gogh's focus was the effect of colors or was it deeper? Just curious, as I haven't dipped into painting yet, being a literature individual myself.

Wow, those are absolutely gorgeous. I love it when people start art threads. I wish I knew more about it.

Find that artist who painted the scenes of city life in Paris. Those are without a doubt my favorite impressionist paintings.

When you go to college you can take an art history class. They're 95% boring talking and 5% beautiful images, but you do get to see some nice art.

Matisse?

The one with the train stations and all that, and the couple walking. Their pretty famous, I just can't remember who it is.

Manet painted a train station, perhaps that's who you're thinking of?

Scratch that, it was two different artists, Manet and Caillebotte. Manet's been posted, Caillebotte was the one I was referring to.

Manet's "The Railroad"



Caillebotte's "Paris, Rainy Day", "L'Pont De l'Europe" (two images) and "Man at the Window"









And another famous one for your viewing pleasure, Courbet's "The Stonebreakers"



I think Caillebotte is my favorite, absolutely gorgeous.

Such incredible texture to his work; almost photographic in detail.

I still haven't decided if I'm going or not.

That's why I love it so much, so clean, so detailed. He may not be as "impressionistic" as other impressionists, but his work is simply beautiful.

Although his use of color was an important attribute of his work, IMO I would say the strongest aspect is the texture and sense of motion created by his very active and loose brushwork. The color helps create the specific mood of the piece but when viewed in person one can see through the brushwork the process by which he executed the piece, reproductions in no way do the work justice. Personally, I would call him more of an expressionist but the argument could be made for another stance, although I wouldn't really compare his work to artists like Matisse who are without a doubt expressionist.