impressionism

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Art

In His Largest LEGO Work To Date, Ai Weiwei Recreates One of Claude Monet’s Most Famous Paintings

Known for incorporating recognizable, everyday objects into monumental sculptures, Ai Weiwei (previously) has created acclaimed installations using bicycles, life vests, and seeds and flowers made of porcelain that often challenge political issues such as the social unrest of his native China, the global refugee crisis, and themes of liberty and freedom of speech. Since 2014, he has utilized LEGO as a medium but not without some controversy along the way due to the political nature of his work. Now, Ai has completed his largest LEGO piece to date in a recreation of “Water Lilies,” one of French Impressionist artist Claude Monet’s most iconic artworks.

Monet’s Water Lilies series was inspired by the artist’s garden in Giverny, France, featuring a foot bridge over a pond teeming with wildlife. This idyllic setting was the design and creation of Monet himself, who at the turn of the 20th century had the nearby River Epte partially diverted in order to bring his vision to life. Ai challenges our perceptions of natural beauty and reality, replacing brush strokes with plastic bricks redolent of digital pixels, using a more saturated color palette, and embedding shadows that evoke a hint of unease.

Both accessible and recognizable, LEGO allows Ai to broach difficult topics in a format that is more approachable. On the right-hand side, he has placed a dark portal depicting the door to the underground dugout in Xinjiang Province where he and his father, Ai Qing, lived in forced exile in the 1960s.

Composed of nearly 650,000 pieces in 22 colors, “Water Lilies #1” is part of Ai Weiwei: Making Sense, the artist’s forthcoming exhibition at The Design Museum. which runs April 7 through July 30 in London. Follow more updates on Instagram.

 

Photography

Botanical: A Collection of Impressionistic Plant Specimens Captured Against Greenhouse Glass

Samuel Zeller began photographing greenhouses in 2015 after making a spontaneous trip to the Jardin d’hiver on his way home from work in Geneva, Switzerland. He was instantly fascinated by the blurred quality of the botanical specimens when gently pressed against the rippled glass, and began documenting this effect in greenhouses across Europe. His collection of images from the last three years have recently been compiled into the book Botanical, published this spring by Hoxton Mini Press.

“What I’m doing right now is very much influenced by my past,” Zeller tells Colossal regarding the plant-based series. “I’ve always enjoyed going to museums, and I developed an attraction for painting, specifically Impressionist ones. In ‘Botanical’ I tried to re-create this painterly feeling by capturing a refracted reality.”

When viewing the images, an intimacy can be felt between Zeller’s lens and the glass-guarded ferns, florals, and succulents despite the physical barrier that separates them. You can see more of his plant photography on his Instagram and Behance. (via Feature Shoot)

Art Photography

New Mixed Media Landscapes and Still Lifes That Merge Photography and Impressionism by Stev’nn Hall

Stev’nn Hall (previously) blends photography and painting together in an impressionistic style, often focusing his works on the rural landscapes of his Canadian home, or images of flowers he takes in his studio. The pieces are built from images shot with a 35mm camera, and feature gestures on the surface in the mediums of acrylic, ink, and pastel. These markings serve as both complements to the landscapes and abstract bits of scrawl, simultaneously pushing the underlying photograph to appear more like a painting, and Hall’s painted additions to seem like photographic errors. You can see more of his mixed media works on Tumblr and Instagram.

Art Photography

Mixed Media Works Bring an Impressionist Hand to Rural Canadian Landscapes

Blurring the line between the real and imagined, Stev’nn Hall paints and stains images he takes with his 35 mm camera, often landscapes of his rural Ontario hometown. Each mixed media work contains a collaboration of more than 40 images which are combined, blown up, and mounted on birch panel. With acrylic, ink, and pastel he further distorts each image in an impressionist style, imbuing the ponds, prairies, and rural streets with exaggerated colors one might see through a sun flare or tinted glass.

Hall is a graduate of Concordia University where he studied film, painting, and photography. Before dedicating himself full time to his mixed media works, he was an award-winning television producer and director of indie music videos. You can see more of the Canadian artist’s process and work on his Tumblr and Instagram. (via Arch Atlas)

Art

Oil Landscapes Transformed into Mosaics of Color by Erin Hanson

While doing undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, artist Erin Hanson took some time off from studying art to obtain a degree in bioengineering. After graduating she moved to the outskirts of Las Vegas where a climb at Red Rock Canyon inspired her artistic career yet again. She decided to commit to creating a new painting each week, a process she continues today, eight years later.

Hanson transforms landscapes into abstract mosaics of color using an impasto paint application, where thick globs of paint create almost sculptural forms on the canvas. She tries to use a few brush strokes as possible, without layering, a process that’s been called “open impressionism.” Hanson is represented by too many galleries to list here, though she does have a number of available paintings listed on her site, as well as prints.