ART
On a Tip of a Brush
Anastasia Kostenko
Lyceum BSPU,
Blagoveshchensk (Russia)
«Every man's work, whether it be
literature or music or pictures or architecture
or anything else, is always a portrait of himself»
Samuel Butler.
Creativity is the expression of oneself.
To be a creative person means to think
differently, act differently, listen to yourself.
Creativity helps us to get involved in the
outside world and appreciate its beauty. In my
o p i n i o n , c re a t i v i t y i s t h e c re a t i o n o f
something beautiful, something of yourself. As
for me, art is the closest kind of creativity. It is
the expression of one's feelings and ideas on
the paper. It is a way to open one's soul, one's
private world to other people.
I h a ve b e e n d o i n g a r t s i n c e m y
childhood. Then I tried to engage in music,
sport, dances, but still I decided that drawing
attracts me most of all. I graduated from the
Art School of Blagoveshchensk. During the
period of study I developed my own style. I
can't give it a specific name, but I think that
this is something like Impressionism. In my
works I use gentle, pastel colors, and there are
no black or bright colors in the palette. I think it
gives my works lightness, fabulousness,
softness and harmony. As people say, in my
drawings there is the atmosphere of a dream
and magic. Also my close friends say: «Your
drawings are exactly the same as you». And
indeed, the image on a sheet of paper is a
reflection of the artist's soul.
32
SUNRISE
I am inspired by the works of French
impressionist artists such as Edouard Manet,
Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir and Berthe
Morisot. These artists aspired to embody a
real world in its mobility and variability, to
transmit their fleeting impressions by applying
smears of different colors side by side, which
allowed to obtain the effect of shining
objects. Their works carry the atmosphere of
lightness, naturalness, mood and warmth.
In fact, that movement appeared in
1870, when a group of artists sometimes
gathered in the open air and tried to
reproduce on canvas their emotions and
impressions that the landscape gave them.
Their manner of painting turned out to be
different; it was completely different from the
one adopted so far: their works were not
detailed and realistic, and the topics were not
related to classical or historical subjects. The
importance of the traditional subject matter
was downgraded and attention was shifted to
the artist's manipulation of colour, tone, and
texture. They usually painted outdoors while
looking at the actual scene instead of
finishing up a painting from sketches in the
studio.
One of the founders of Impressionism
was Oscar Claude Monet (along with him the
principal Impressionist painters were Claude
Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro,
Alfred Sisley, Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne).
Most often, the artist depicted nature on his
canvases, as well as his family: his wife and son.
He loved to draw a water lily pond located in his
own garden in Giverny. He painted that pond
at different times, from different angles and in
any light. Claude Monet painted the canvas
with wide and coarse strokes that created
the effect of movement - as if we see a real
landscape with a pond. The artist didn't mix
paint on the palette, he did it on canvas. The
artist often used a large number of shades of
green and blue, smoothly flowing into each
other. Petals of lilies aren't just white - you can
see pink, blue and purple colors on them. Due
to the yellow color, the canvas is literally
illuminated from the inside by bright sunlight.
What`s more, he was the one after whom the
whole movement began. He painted the
famous picture Impression, soleil levant
(Impression, Sunrise) that depicts his
hometown, the por t of Le Havre and
represents the two small rowboats in the
foreground and the red sun being the focal
element. Everything is in mist and haze. Having
been published in the catalogue it got popular
and the term Impression or Impressionism
"was immediately taken up by all parties" to
describe the style. So, the canvas first
appeared in public at Exhibition of the
Impressionists in Paris in April and
encapsulated the start of the movement.
February 2019 №2