Tonight with the Impressionists | Hacker News Reader

Tonight with the Impressionists

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36 pointsadrianhon6 comments

I was in Paris in March and had a ticket for this. I was at the museum an hour before my booked time slot. The square in front of the entrance was one gigantic queue, and when I asked at the front I was told that they were still processing people who had booked a time slot an hour before that. I decided not to stand around in the rain for two hours for a very dubious chance to get what I had paid for. There are no refunds for any reason ever, of course.

It's a shame because when I lived in Paris the Musée d'Orsay was one of my favorites. Apparently management changed sometime in the last few years, and ticket sales are higher than ever. But only because it has turned into yet another tourist trap.

I saw it in mid April. Walked right in at the scheduled time. But I did feel that was anomalous. Both d’Orsay and Louvre should really be capping daily entrants - it’s becoming a significant waste to go when you’re 5-10 meters away with a crowd between you and most works of art.

I visited a small museum near where I live the other day (The Kröller-Müller Museum, in the Netherlands), the founder happened to pick up quite a few Van Gogh paintings over her collecting, including one of my favourites (Terrasse du Café le Soir), but also a lot of other incredible works by him. One of the things that stood out to me is how the oil is so thickly layered in some paintings. It's most obvious in Cypresses and Two Women -- the painting is so rich with oil paint (so I guess it was done in a period when he could afford plenty of materials) the trees all have a ridged texture to them.

It's just another dimension to his art, but it really grabbed me. It's not something that would be easy to replicate in a VR exhibition, I don't think.

Impasto. The wiki article has a Van Gogh as the main picture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impasto

I never really liked it, but I might just have been subjected to a lot of amateurish pretentious use of the technique. It kind of screams "I am a painter", but you need to back that up with something or it's just annoying and closer to "I am making a mess". Possibly good training for cake decoration after you give up art and take up baking.

If it can help appreciate impastos better:

First, most paintings are created to be looked at from a distance, and not from up-close. In particular to this effect, painters regularly step back when working.

Second, regarding impastos, the wikipedia article is quite expeditious:

> it makes the light reflect in a particular way, giving the artist additional control over the play of light in the painting

Here's a practical example:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Duparc-v...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Longcham...

Because the painting is lit from above (it's almost always the case), the portion of the impasto facing toward the light, receives more light than anything else in the painting: it's one way to "paint" "whiter than white", very convenient to create highlights.

It's in particular noticeable on the nose of the previous painting. Noses are a bit greasy, and will thus reflect more light.

On the other side of the impasto, a little shadow can be casted. It can be used to echo the form being depicted. This is being used, for example on her right lower eyelid, where there's a little cast shadow (and a highlight).

It's some sort of a tiny bas-relief.

But all those impastos from up-close look weird, unnatural. "Gross" even, in this particular case…

Oh OK, that's quite cunning, and relevant to the article, where Monet is painting a sunset but the scene in front of him is copied from the painting, and so the sun emits no light and has no glare and hangs in the sky like a levitating egg yolk. Perhaps impasto on the sun could help there (perhaps it does, on the real painting).

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