Monet to Matisse.
I decided to visit the Royal Academy’s Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse exhibition in order to reaffirm my self with the materiality that exists in painting. This exhibition is a selection of some of the most prolific Impressionist and Post Impressionist artists working between the 1860s - 1920s. This time frame was exactly the same as the paintings that I had been sourcing to create my google image replicas. Therefore it allowed me to come into contact and truly experience the presence of these paintings within a gallery space. Reacquaintance with this incredible set of paintings allowed me to marvel at the skill of these iconic painters. Matisse, Monet, Van Gogh, Bonnard, Nolde, Klimt and Kandinsky all have distinctive styles and each one creates wonder with their own unique touch of the paint brush.
The garden of the artist forms their apart of their artistic identity, their own interpretation of a space that is so close to them generates some fantastic art. These artists are creating images through building of layers of paint, that has been applied with a certain amount of expression or impression. They are using the paint as a malleable material in order to create an image that is not only a representation of an object but is also filled with nuance and poetry. This is realised through vivid colour and broad brush marks that transform objects beyond their original appearance.
This is of course fundamentally different to what the camera does, even in a vivid colour photography we expect to see photographic representation and realism. Our expectations would also assume the photograph to be a flat image cast on a screen or print. Where as the impressionist painting is far from flat. The painting contours from detail to detail as texture is applied to exude everything it can from the paint in order to create an image.
The surface of an image is perhaps the largest difference between the two medium. The true surface of a photograph moves from the light that has been captured through the dark bellows of the camera and onto the piece of celluloid or sensor that hold the image. This is then copied to a medium where the image can be seen by the eye.
Painting is utterly reliant on the eye and the brush. The surface of the paint that is visible to the eye becomes the image. Representations are created through looking. There is a relationship between what the artist sees and the conscious decisions that lead to the artists interpretation through the paint. The photographic image with this surface that shifts between the stages of the photographs existence, and the paint who's surface becomes the image are both pictorial methods of displaying imagery. The two share many likenesses and differences and there is a great amount of influence bearing down on one another.
To get back to the exhibition of which the theme is the garden, we see how the garden and painting nature shifted the artists focus and allowed impression and expression to be form. Natural forms seem inherent to the impressionist image. Personally i would argue that the invention of photography drove the painters to begin searching for new techniques and styles of painting. But it is undoubtably true that this was found in the relationships between painting nature and establishing impressionism. Both of which were emboldened by the likes of Pierre Monet, who’s paintings have become the most renowned for presenting beauty through the garden..
Encountering Matisse after creating Google Image Still Life.
Unfortunately there weren't any paintings that I had previously replicated through my own image sourcing techniques. But seeing Matisse’s work hanging on the wall did seem very strange. It was the same feeling I had returning to the Rothko room after creating my series based around the Seagrams Mural’s. After looking at images for so long online you almost forget that they are real objects, they have this presence that your own personal screen can not reproduce. This is the painting that Matisse created, not an image of it not a reproduction but the actual physical painting. Being able to admire an original makes all the other reproductions feel redundant. But for me it is the fact that those reproduction exist and can be accessed anywhere in the world is fascinating.
This particular exhibition is completely sold out, access to the paintings becomes very limited. They are no longer for everyone but a select few. I find this part of artistic tradition quite frustrating. Of course what this is doing is increasing value by restricting access. My own confrontation of Matisse’s work in that gallery made options like Google’s Art Project seem very fragile, they become a point of reference but can never even get close to becoming the real thing. I would have loved to have the chance to be able to sit in front of the painting with my laptop and access to the internet then create my own collage just using the painting in front as a basis. Instead of my usual technique of overlaying the image on photoshop and building up from there.