Artistic Polar Bear Challenge: 100 Ways In 100 Days. #48 - Impressionist

Let's continue on our whirlwind tour of art history.  Where should we stop next?  Maybe the Rococo age, where luxurious decorative arts reigned, and whimsical subjects were painted with nostalgic subtle and delicate tones.

On second thought....maybe not.

Perhaps the period of Romanticism, where artists exaggerated certain colors to express the religious and social themes of the day.  Or the time of the Realists, where artists like John Constable strove to duplicate the local colors of the landscape.

But I have a yen to get to one of my favorites: the Impressionists.  From about 1860 to 1900, artists like Pissarro, Monet, and Renoir chose to give a group middle finger to the teachings of the Neoclassical and Romantic periods, with their dark colors and precise glazes.  The Impressionist artists took their easels outside to study light and paint it with bright and loose colors in a single sitting.  Light became the subject, rather than the subject itself.

Impressionist Bear

Acrylic on paper