Description:
This piece is painted with a thicker acrylic type paint that allows the artist to build layers on layers, with each color drying in between their applications. Every stroke is applied with a palette knife, laying on new color only when the last has dried. Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh, Renoir and others used similar techniques to create images much like this one. The technique is called Impasto, an Italian word meaning "to make paste." Its use gives the painting a feeling that is surreal yet it is a technique out of the past.
................................................The subject of the painting is the crystal vase to the left of the canvas and the spoon and demitasse cup to the right. The art piece is visually "collaged" with paint, meaning that visual boxes are insinuated by the way they are painted, with the demitasse spoon in the upper right corner and the cup in the bottom right area of the canvas board. A demitasse s a small cup of strong black coffee or espresso. The demitasse spoon is also small, to complement the size of the cup. This set is antique.
................................................It is intriguing that the Impasto technique began in an art period in which it was mocked and largely ignored. However, with time, it was accepted as one on the most interesting types of art created. Jackson Pollock summed it up this way:
"I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added."
................................................Because of its gradual acceptance by the art world over a period of a few hundred years, the impasto style blends with traditional (Renoir, Van Gogh) to contemporary art (Pollock) decor.
