Toward Impressionism

Closing the loop

Two hundred years after the phrase was first coined, ‘Impressionism’ remains an incredibly important movement in art history. It is easier to say what it is not rather than to say what it is. It came about as a reaction to three centuries of steadily refined accuracy of depiction that came out of the French art academies. If I am allowed to borrow an expression from one of my art teachers, it was a point where artists ‘loosened up a bit’ and reintroduced fluidity and inaccuracy into art and I would wager that when you ask someone to name a famous artist it is highly likely that the first name that springs to their lips is that of one the Impressionist – Monet ? Degas ? Renoir ? – or perhaps one of the Post-impressionists – Cezanne ? Van Gogh ? Seurat ? Lautrec ?

Claude Monet, ‘Impression, sunrise’

The term ‘Impressionism’ was originally meant an as insult (how often are derogatory terms adopted by the subjects as badges of honour?) and sprang from the pen of the critic Louis Leroy in response to the above picture by Monet (‘…at most, a sketch, and could hardly be termed a finished work….’) but of course Leroy was writing from the perspective of an establishment that had accepted the French academic view that art meant rigour, accuracy and exquisite technique. Monet was to have the same impact on his art peers that The Ramones or The Sex Pistols had on theirs. It was nothing short of an earthquake and it’s aftershocks are still very much with us. In fact we wouldn’t be without them, such is the resonance that Impressionist works strike with the viewer.

Which leads me on to the photography….

Impressionism is very much about light, quite often transient light. The way that the eye may not see detail all of the time but will nearly always see colour, brightness and contrast. Sometimes just shape. It’s almost as if detail only matters when we really need to pay attention to something. The rest of the time we only get an impression – see what they did there? Clever eh ? – of what’s happening around us. I love transient, contrasty light. One of the important aspects of photography that I try to impress on people who come to work with me is that very often the best light is very fleeting and you have to be very quick with the camera to catch it. As I have said previously, so much of modern photography is about phenomena. About being in the right place at the right time and having camera that you know how to use well. As modern impressionists, photographers have an advantage over painters in that they do not have to rely on memory to recall a particular effect of the light to later depict it. It is captured at the point of inception (we hope!).

A good few years ago, when I was still trying to work out which end of a paintbrush to use, I encountered the work of William Neal. I found his Marginal Movements work utterly mesmerising. I just couldn’t get my head around how someone could read and depict light in the way that he does (See previous blog posts on Synaesthesia) in paint. I knew that I simply could not paint like that and I suspect that it was at that point that my painting/photography schism really took shape. I had been working in both media for quite a while but the photography had been coming more to the fore and I had started to let the art go a bit when I realised that I simply couldn’t paint like William Neal.

While I have not consciously been attempting to take a photographic road to the same destination as William Neal it is clear to me now that I have been trying to work toward a place at least in the same area of transient light. My journey, however, has until very recently been hampered by the inadequacy of the tools that I have chosen to use. Cameras do not see the world in the same way as the eye and brain. In particular they have by comparison a severely limited dynamic range – the differences between light and dark that can be perceived in a single scene. The dynamic range of the eye and brain is much greater than that of all current modern digital cameras. High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is a technique designed to compensate for this by creating composite images from frames of different exposures. The result is a good approximation of what the eye actually sees. The method that I have been working on is not HDR as such, it is actually a form of exposure blending. HDR has certain inadequacies, particularly the disabling of the Brain Stem->Parietal Cortex path. It lends itself superbly to the built landscape but doesn’t work so well in the organic landscape. It can be done but there are other issues outwith image recording that the depicted scene toward which I have been working HDR can’t help with and where exposure blending is the right route.

Here’s where I am currently on the path ….

Sunlit Thistles, Mitchell Field by Chris Gilbert

It was only when I put this shot together that I realised that all along I had been working toward William Neal’s Marginal Movements with a camera. The backlighting, the illumination, the looking into the sun. All things that I l love but which photography does badly ! So I think that I can safely say that I have crossed a boundary with this image – and indeed the rest of the set that I created that evening ….

The Path Home by Chris Gilbert

Sunset Over Mitchell Field by Chris Gilbert

Millstone Edge by Chris Gilbert

I’ll continue to work on the method. It requires perfecting. It doesn’t work for all situations and I need to work out quickly when it is and when it is not appropriate. I also have to resist becoming obsessive about it to the detriment to other approaches to depiction.

There is one final and wonderfully symmetrical aspect to this journey and that is the role that the early pioneers of photography played in inspiring the Impressionists. The work of, for example, Edweard Muybridge and his contemporaries opened the artists’ eyes to the informality of snatched, candid moments and accidental visual poetry – sometimes blurred – in the everyday and externally mundane life. This informed the work of many of the artists working in the Impressionist genre – and of course there is a fierce irony here in that there is an annoyingly persistent view among many art critics that photography is a debased art form. The reality is that since it’s invention it has been a source of inspiration and a creative outlet for artists themselves.

Landscape Photography Courses in the Peak District National Park