Impressions

For this week’s blog I choose the “River Bank” by Daniel Garber, an Impressionist painting from 1910.  Over the last four years I have been in the MUMAA more times than I can count and this piece has always stood out to me.  I feel as though the big idea behind River Bank is beauty, a moment of beauty that you can feel as much as see.  In the first part of the 20^th century artist began using oil paints en plein air, out of doors, for the first time with the advent of premixed tub paints.  Artmaking became portable which the Impressionist artist took full advantage.  These artists were interested in the quality of light and color and how each would change with the time of day.  They wanted to express emotion and movement as well.  

I would like to use Garber’s piece to inspire students to think about how emotion can be expressed in their own art work.  Using one emotion in particular the students would construct a piece which shows this emotion and has a strong sense of light, or the lack thereof.  Garber created a poetic and luminous image of the Delaware River with his “transient effects of light”.

Questions:  How does light effect the landscape?  How did he use the river to show light?  How would the piece be changed if Garber had painted it at dusk or evening?  The choosing of the medium can be just as important as the emotion.  What medium did the artist choose?  How important to the subject matter is the medium or how would the subject matter change if charcoal or water color were used?  Would the piece still express what the artist intended?

Students need the tools to understand how to create a strong image.  For River Bank a deep inspection of Impressionism and the ways in these artists thought about art compared to the way we see it today is vital to finding a deeper meaning in this piece.  One image can invoke very different responses from a group of people viewing it.  Beauty can have a million different definitions and interpretations.  Investigating what other people think of an image can inform upon your own work.  For the Impressionist the utensil with which an artist created a piece was just important as the time or day they work in.