The basic characteristic of Impressionism was taking light and color as the center of understanding of the world. With in-depth scientific research and development, people in the 19th century had already known the reason for objects to display different colors is due to their different light absorption and reflection. Objects were black after absorbing sunlight, white after reflecting sunlight, and blue after reflecting blue light and absorbing other light. Any object in the nature must be influenced by the light source color and the surrounding environment of other objects of color. Therefore it was not possible to have absolutely pure natural colors. Those idea of thinking trees were green and the flowers were red were only the understanding in certain historical conditions. In the 19th century of scientific development, it had obviously outdated. People realized that even with the same light source, different times in the early morning and evening would produce different colors on the object. And the object and the distance to the light source, the light angle, variation of surface smoothness conditions could affect the color. The relationship between light and color was extremely complex and delicate. Thus, the traditional color idea was completely broken.
With the abandonment of the fixed color concepts, people's awareness of color was also greatly deepened. We had found there were pairs of light mixed with each other and several colors turned into black. So people called these colors and paint the complementary color relationship and called such two paints complementary colors, such as yellow and purple, red and green, orange and blue. In color sketch, this complementary relationship helped people to analysis and identified the color.
People's understanding of the shadow had also greatly changed. They used to think that the shadow is only brown or black, no color at all. When using the light source and the environment of the scientific concept to observe the objects, they could found the shadow was reflected by the light and influenced by the surrounding environment light, showing the rich color and shadow, and the opposite light source color and temperature color. These understandings made the Impressionists boldly use color. They began to use color or color point for depiction of objects to pursue real and bright light effect, such as using red and blue for bright purple. In this way, the paintings of impressionist painters suddenly became very bright. If a classical oil painting and impressionistic light works were put together, you would be amazed at the achievements of impressionist painters in the color, because their paintings really embodied the charm of light and color.
Objectiveness represents the individual's instant visual impression
Impressionist painters not only took a great step in color, but also began to reform in the way of observation. In the past, people always followed the traditional and close to the sepia tones to draw the objects. The reason why they could not draw impressionistic bright colors was that people did not completely follow the observation of their eyes and lacked of scientific help, but only in accordance with the known colors to paint. Impressionist painters abandoned all the traditional concepts of color to capture the visual feelings light resulting in objects; this feeling was purely personal. Thus the colors in the painting were very bright, rich and full of personality. Their purpose was trying to objectively and possibly realistic represent the object. The Impressionists completely focused on capturing the visual impression and the pursuit of color changes. They often neglected the shape and contour of the object and painted object very loose and free for the only pursuit of color effect. People who were used to appreciating rigorous classical paintings were difficult to accept their art. In order to keep the works dynamic and realistic, most Impressionist painters took practice as creation and advocated finishing works in a light and no longer changed them after back to studio.
Emphasis on aesthetic function of paintings
The traditional art have attached great importance to the content of the works. Classicalism loved plot, religious and historical themes; the romantic school often based on literary stories and the exotic, realism to depict and closely related to the times and social events to describe the common laborer; Impressionist mainly pursued the color effect of color changes, namely, the pursuit of art form with no interest in the theme and plot of painting. The Impressionists realized, based on a variety of different sensory organs all kinds of art communicated human feelings and the human spiritual activities must rely on special sensory channels to fully display. The literature mainly took language; words resorted to the thought, the music through melody, rhythm through the auditory, visual art resorting to color and lines. The plot and the story of painting could be appropriately attributed to literature function. Therefore, what they cared about was how to draw, concern about art form and color lines to create the visual impression and stimulation, regardless of its contents, no longer caring about what to paint. When we saw some of the Impressionists not to mind taking the trouble to draw a haystack and 20 pieces of a bridge, it was not a surprising thing.
Exploration of impressionist painting forms and pursuit of the painting nature made the painting become richer and freer with more painting characteristics. It should be said that this is liberation of painting. But its cognition function and education function of painting neglect is not desirable, which makes the Impressionist works often lack of social and historical sense of depth.
