How the Impressionists Used Texture in Their Brushstrokes
Exploring the meaningful qualities of painted marks in art
How is it possible for a brushstroke to be expressive? How can paint in itself register on an emotional level?
There was once a time when artists made their paintings with a deliberate attempt to hide their brush marks, to blend and soften them as much as possible, so that they disappeared from view. The French Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a master at the alchemy of transforming paint into a variety of other textures and materials — satin, skin, feathers, pearls — as his La Grande Odalisque aptly demonstrates.
Then, as the 19th century progressed, artists began to experiment with the idea of formal elements of paintings — that is, the colours, shapes and textures of a painting — as having emotional qualities in themselves.
Developments in the psychology of perception, along with the invention of photography, spurred artists to consider the activity of painting as having its own unique qualities, with the potential to allow the artist an idiosyncratic response from direct and…
