Saw a recent exposition of impressionism and earlier art periods, the beginning of the year at The Montreal Museum and was impressed with canvases that I have seen before.
A Tissot painting called October showing a woman dressed in the day and turning as she walks away caught my sight. It was life like with dabs of light filtering through the overhanging foliage and onto her dress and skin. I like the "modern" stylized approach that impressionists were taking with their subjects who were not always in set, structured poses. This one was caught in movement. There was an equally large canvas by Constant
called "Dawn After Victory" which showed more detailed information towards the centre of the painting and lesser detail toward the periphery as some impressionists would incorporate in their works. The victor coming into the seemingly Persian town (because of the detailed Persian tapestries hanging over walls, is quite clear, while a woman of the town in the right foreground is clear but to a lesser degree. Then two as I understood from art studies, women busts were not given the attention they are today.
Let me skip a hundred years to get to the coloured shapes that fill a modernist painting. There was a boldness never quite attempted with colour until the painting was stripped of recognizable images and colour were contrasted through geometrical shapes or even blotches. This was a noticeable abstraction for painters like Borduas and Riopelle, two greats in Canadian art in the mid part of the last century. Those shapes got to moulded into stripes and panelled swathes, as painters towards the later half of the century experimented in the apparent movement of the coloured form towards the viewer. Painters had by then realized that art not only meant the painting of recognizable forms and their abstractions, they also new how to paint without reference to any particular subject other than colour itself and how we can perceive it.
