How does colour affect the mood of the art work? Examination of paintings by Monet, Pollock and Kandinsky.

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Sahar Malik

How does colour affect the mood of the art work?

Introduction

My course work is on the effect of colour, and how this affects the mood of the artist’s work. The artists I have looked at are mostly expressionist and impressionist artists. They are:

  • Claude Monet – light effects, and colour
  • Jackson Pollok – later works on drip painting, and use of a limited colour pallet
  • Wassily Kandinsky – change of paintings over time

 

I chose these artists because I find their use of bright and bold colours fascinating, and find the techniques in which they paint very interesting as well as extravagant, as they all have their own unique quality. I also like the way the painting has been applied to the canvas which is expressive and could also be therapeutic, as it allows your body to flow, taking you into a rhythm.

Monte is an impressionist artist who uses a limited pallet, to create mostly landscape and seascape sceneries. His use of a limited pallet would help him to achieve different tones in the paint he was using, which allowed him to focus on the light and dark aspects of the painting. Over the years the pallet he used changed from blues and greens to reds and browns, and also the paintings of sceneries became more blurred, due to his eye sight becoming worse and worse over time. He focuses mostly on how light touches objects, and how this gives a more realistic affect in the painting. When creating shadows he does not use black, but he blends a series of colours (browns created using reds and blues) to create a darker colour close to black.

Jackson Pollock is an artist who applies paint to canvas in an expressive way, called ‘’action painting’’. He has different ways of applying paint which have different feelings behind brush stroke and flick, for example a fast flick could represent anxiousness. He tends to use black a lot in his paintings, maybe showing darkness, despair and loneliness. The colours he generally uses are very earth, nothing too bright. Kandinsky has a more structural approach to his paintings, and is also an expressionist artist, although he got his early inspiration from Monet who is an Impressionist artist. He uses a variety of bold colours and shapes in his paintings, which take a lot of thought into structuring the initial idea. He focuses on the geometrical side of art, which include use of shapes which are structured in a certain way.

Through researching these artists, I would like to discover why their artwork uses such limited but bold colours, and how they implement it into their work mentally and physically. This will allow me to develop my skills into techniques of blending and applying the different colours that work well together, in order to create an Impressionist or Expressionist piece of art work.

I would like to find out why and how exactly artists like Kandinsky and Pollock structure their designs and choice of colour, to create deep feeling and thought within their paintings. There are different uses of different colours, and these are used to create a mood in the painting, for example light colours represent good things like purity and kindness, whereas dark colours are more remorse filled and represent loneliness. A colour like red can be seen in different ways, for example it could mean love and passion, or it could represent anger and blood, which are two extremes.

Chapter 1 – Claude Monet

Claude Monet was born in Paris, France and became the founder of French Impressionist movement. He was brought up in Le Havre, where he studied caricaturist. But then was inspired by the artist Eugene Boudin, which made him change his style of painting from caricaturist to more landscape paintings. Eugene Boudin inspired Monet to paint by showing him Normandy, when seeing the beautiful lands of Normandy he went on to create his first Immersionist painting, and do studies of how light falls upon haystacks.

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Impressionist art is a style of painting where the artist takes a quick glimpse of an image of an object or place, and would paint it exactly how they saw it in that glimpse. Theses impressionist artists often use a lot of bright colours in their paintings making them vibrant. Most of the paintings are of the outdoors, and the artists try to capture the light of the objects in their paintings.

Claude Monet was known for his outdoor landscapes and for painting series of the same image during different times of day and at different times of ...

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