Colors!

"Sometimes I will look away very quickly, and freeze frame that first impression, pleased with myself that I have outsmarted my own smartness, and perceived a colour as it actually is." -Catherine Taylor

As Taylor suggests in the quote above, Impressionism was a style of producing art that was perhaps more real than realism. Characterized by a "novel, bold, and 'sketchy' manner," Impressionistic art was all about communicating the painter's "first impressions" of the subject by remaining "sincere or honest to the appearance of a motif under a single, unified light" (19). Artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Paul Cezanne all stuck to the idea that art shouldn't be all about strict rules and regulations one was supposed to follow in order to make "good" art, instead, it should profess the bare naked truth of what the eye sees. If one was presented an unfamiliar object and had no prior knowledge of what it could be, how would one describe what they're seeing? He/she would have to go back to the basics, asking what color the object is, what are the shapes and forms of the object and most importantly, what sort of feelings or thoughts does it impose on the observer at first glance?

In order to stimulate certain sensations, artists of this movement used certain techniques involving patches of color. "Cezanne's portrait does break things down into colour patches, and so enacts the ideas its sitter refers to: that painting sensations meant painting in 'stains'" (28). Interestingly enough, it seems that the Impressionists knew or had an idea of how specific colors can create certain moods in one's brain when perceived by the eye. Neurological studies today suggest that certain colors like green causes relaxation and deeper breathing, purple stimulates creativity, and orange increases sexual urges (http://library.thinkquest.org/C0114820/artistic/visual.php3). Even though artists used color to create a sense of light, colors were a key aspect to producing these "impressions" viewers got when looking at an Impressionistic work of art--a technique simply revolutionary.