I once knew a man who loved nature. When he was young, he used to climb mountains. Alpinism was his passion. The top of the world was the place where he could find peace, where it was quiet, away from the annoying sounds of the city. As he grew older, he got married and had children. Time passed before him and soon he felt the desire to be in the middle of the nature once more. He didn’t have time or money to climb mountains anymore. So in the middle of the city, in the little garden in front of his flat he set a tent.

Some people feel the nature so ardent in their soul that they transform the environment around them, so they could feel peace once again. Claude Monet painted nature, but at the end of his life he wanted to be inserted in it as in a dream. He brought nature to his home, by building a paradise garden at Giverny. Monet builds, this way, a live canvas made by the painter’s artistic fantasy. He managed to perfectly harmonize with his painting a real and physically place, developing the naturally topic drawn before actually settling it on canvas. This operation is directed towards the continuous search of merger with the beauty and untouched nature.

At the beginning of May 1883, Monet and his family rented a house situated near the road between the towns of Vernon and Gasny. He transformed the barn into a painting studio. The beautiful landscape gave Monet suitable motifs for his paintings. During the 1890s, Monet built a greenhouse and a second studio. A spacious building well lit with skylights. At the end of 1890 he could buy this property, when his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel had been increasing success in selling his paintings. Then in 1893 he bought a plot on the South border of the property, where, after getting the authorization, he created the famous water garden with the floating water lilies, irises, willow trees and carob tree planted around. After the garden had been accomplished, it was extended in 1901. Monet had proven a tremendous care for the flower beds and hedges, and the choice of plant species: anemones, irises, poppies and climber roses. Monet was able, by methods he only knew, to grow in the garden many exotic plants from Mexico or China. He wrote daily instructions to his gardener, precise designs and layouts for plantings, and invoices for his floral purchases and his collection of botany books.

His live opera had become the meeting point for the artist’s friends, many of his admirers and nature passionate. With time the garden was transformed into a chromatic combination scattered on several paintings: Artist’s Garden at Giverny, Garden Path at Giverny, The Japanese Bridge, Blutentore in Giverny and the famous series of the Water Lilies.

Thus, the real and final meaning of “en plain air” painting finds full realization in the choice of doing a work, transformed into a harmonious and pictorially place. Therefore, his vision of nature was converted into reality in order to be transferred on canvas.

The art critic Arsene Alexandre wrote in “Le Figaro” newspaper that the artist included in the garden “all the colors of a palette and the tones of a fanfare.” The Giverny place is a “new and unusual show, unexpected as all major surprises.” Marcel Proust described the garden as “a really artistic implementation, more than a model for works, a painted already completed, which glows in the eyes of a great painter.”

Do not let thoughts to intervene in the way of creation, do not think, but simply spread on the canvas as you feel, as if your hand would hold the brush like a robot controlled from another dimension. As if the mind is turned off, you are carried away through the world of colors, and the end is seen as waking up to reality.

When you awake, you then look at your canvas and see the creation of a man who was not present, and all that is left are his feeling’s on canvas. This is a characterization of what Henri Matisse accomplished; the artist himself describes his manner of painting as, “you have to offer yourself up in all purity and innocence, almost cleared of memory, like a communicant going to communion.”

If Frida Kahlo restored feelings of anger, grief and despair on canvas, Matisse tried to create a world setting in which sufferers can be relieved from their pain, and how else than making paintings from his soul: “I am after an art of equilibrium and purity, an art that neither unsettles nor confuses. I would like people who are weary, stressed and broken to find peace and tranquility as they look at my pictures,” said Matisse in his memoirs.

His paintings are not complicated. They do not require any special knowledge of art in order to be understood. This was also the artist’s desire. He wanted to empathize with sufferers by showing them a bohemian world, free from the daily hardships, where they can find refuge. And this he certainly succeeds by minimizing the human figure.

It is all summarized in the contour of the character, which is surrounded by bright colors, pleasing to the eye. These colors give you a sense of freedom. Such an example is the famous painting “La Dance,” made in 1909, that stands now on the Museum of Modern Art’s wall, in New York. The choice of colors has its forerunner in Persian ceramics and miniatures which, until the 13th century, often used pure reds, greens and blues in creating ornamental surfaces. In fact, the oriental style will be present in his paintings throughout his life. However, the explosion of color is what highlightened Matisse as an artist. His trademark is the combination of bright colors next to the strong black outline of the characters.

Matisse clearly explains why he chose to represent such characters: “My models are human figures, not simply extras in some interior. They are the major subject of my work. Their forms may not be perfect, but they are always expressive.” Matisse explains how the simple contour of the bodies awakened in him an emotional interest. Therefore, they do not need to be very visible. The people are often seen in lines or particular values distributed on the entire canvas.

This presentation becomes a sort of orchestral or architectonic extension of the theme in the artist’s eyes. The minimalism is taken to extremes to preserve feelings, it is Matisse’s explanation: “What really concerns me above all else, is expression.” He pursuits for the expression not to be a passion we see on a face, but to be located in the entire painting. The position of the characters, the spaces that he left empty, the proportions, they all made a whole, and if you extract one of them, the painting is left without value.

The still-life is a constant part of Matisse’s art. In addition to human figures, still-life completes the big picture that the artist makes through his paintings in search of the peaceful world that alleviates the suffering. The artist explains that nature is part of human, and Man is part of Nature, and both are linked to the entire Universe.

“Still Life with Oranges” is one of Matisse’s famous paintings. Picasso himself bought it in 1944 out of a private collection. Oranges are often to be found in Matisse’s work. Therefore, Guillaume Apollinaire remarked: “If Matisse’s work can be compared to anything, then to an orange. Like the orange, Henri Matisse’s paintings are the fruit of dazzling light.” However, the artist didn’t copy the objects, because he considered that this type of painting is not art. “What counts is to express the emotion they call forth in you, the feeling they awaken, the relation they established between the objects…”

This is the proof that Matisse was looking for feelings even in still art, in order to give peace to the viewer.

Have you ever tried to feel the color through a grain of paint? George Seurat not only succeeded in doing that, but also began a revolutionary movement.

George Seurat was a lonely person. He never let people see anything but his work. His private life was tucked away from the eyes of friends or even family. His own parents found out, he got married after his death. The only thing he left behind was his revolutionary style of painting. A color grain seated near another until the eye discovers a whole image. This was pointillism.

Seurat passed unknown to the art world for many years after his death. It was in the 1900s that his work had been appreciated to its real value. One of his representative paintings is without any doubt “Bathers at Asnieres”. Seurat only made two pictures in a large format, and this one was his first. The painting includes techniques from fresco painters of the 15th century, of contemporary Impressionism and of color theory. However, the artwork wasn’t made like the classical Impressionist paintings, on the spot. Actually, Seurat began a series of studies before settling on the version as we know it. He recorded the landscapes and figures on the spot, working in oil on small wood panels. He also made drawings of the same subjects in Conte crayon, testing the positions of the characters in the landscape setting. Each of them concentrated on specific details. Seurat studied through the drawings, mainly the contrast between light and dark. Some of the sketches were so good, that he included them into the painting without any change. Some 14 oil sketches and 10 drawings survived that era.

In terms of color, the artist adopted a technique from Delacroix. This consisted in applying white highlights to the local colors. He first applied an undertint over a pale-colored ground. Then, he affixed cross-wise brushstrokes on top of each other. Seurat didn’t make the composition in pointillist technique, because he had not yet invented it. However, in 1887, the artist later reworked areas of the painting using dots of color. The contrast between light and dark had a particular importance for Seurat. He studied the relation between the two in his drawings, and then he interpreted this through color by bringing luminous key notes throughout the painting. As an example, the surface of the water is darker or brighter along the outlines of the characters, making them appear more three-dimensional.

Despite the big number of characters in the painting, Seurat’s figures seem to be isolated and lonely. They seem to be tied up only through a hobby, bathing, as if they don’t really know each other, not even their names. However, the characters are memorable and dignified in their isolation. Looking close to their clothing and manners, the figures can be considered to be part of the lower class in the suburb, who relaxes at the end of a hard-working day. In fact, The Academy of Moral and Political Science had declared in 1874 that the key in developing a moral code among the working class was a day of rest. Thus Sunday had been declared a day off, on which people would spend time with their family.

Nevertheless, the working men preferred to have the day off on Monday and spend it with friends. This is why the figures in the painting are all men, except for a woman standing on the ferry. The female has been included in the picture in order to outline the difference between the classes, the lower one and the rich.
Seurat tried to exhibit the painting in the official Parisian Salon in 1884, but he was rejected. However, the Society of Independent Artists protested against the Salon’s decision, and thus Seurat’s painting was included in the major exhibition in the Paris Pavilion on the Champs-Elysees in December 1884.

The picture was appreciated by the French critics, such as Arsene Alexandre. He wrote: “The Bathers shows Seurat to be the artist of the young school, one of the few who understands how to compose a major work and use new techniques whilst doing so.”

The painting, “Bathers of Asnieres” resides these days on the wall of The London National Gallery Museum.

Frida Kahlo lived in a society where the woman’s ambition was to be a devoted wife and mother. The events that she encountered along her life prevented the artist from achieving such goals. Physical suffering, caused by an accident in her youth, which led to many spinal operations, was reflected in her paintings. Her weakened column detained her from becoming a mother, and in 1939 her husband Diego Rivera decided not to stand next to his “dove”. This was a turning point in Frida’s life, a moment when the suffering caught an even greater proportion, becoming a crucial theme in her paintings. It is also the time when she started making the monumental paintings, which will define her as an artist. The strong Kahlo in the “The Two Fridas” portrait is the woman she became when she realized that her society’s traditions and cultural expectations were unrealistic for her.

In mid-October 1939, the emblematic couple of Mexico, applied for divorce by mutual consent to the Court of Coyoacan. However, the decision to divorce was taken by Diego. He confesses in his autobiography that he couldn’t sit next to Frida in order not to harm her anymore. “I guard her from future trouble. I’ve decided to break up with her. I just wanted to be free, so I could go to the women to whom my desire pushed me.” However, he admits in his autobiography that his love for Frida did not diminish. He hoped to cut off the umbilical cord, rather than break the deep feelings he had for her.

The effect of this decision was the deep loneness that Frida felt, the loss of reference, the breaking ties with her friends and the isolation. All this suffering is shown in a series of images, in which the artist sees herself as a martyr. Her only comfort is the mirror image perceived by the artist as a long known friend that stands beside her in good but mostly in bad moments.

Her own shadow joined her in the painting “The Two Fridas.” The characters are placed on a bench with a straight torso, fixed eyes, as if after the suffering she endured, nothing can knock her down as long as she has herself beside.

In this painting, she tries to return to her origins. “The two Fridas” appear to hold hands, one in a European-clothed, the other as a Mexican. The Tehuana dress refers to her relationship with Diego, that was cut by divorce, represented in the painting by the scissors. A bloody vein connects the suffering heart to the intact one.

The courageous Frida joins hands with the suffering Frida, as if hoping to relieve her pain. Both have a vision that gives the viewer the impression of an agreement with herself, having triumphed over pain by closing Diego in a small medallion that she holds between her fingers.

The painting’s origin is explained by the artist herself in her memoirs. Frida tells how as a child she lived with intensity an imaginary friendship with a girl. She used to make steam on the window glass in her room. With her finger, she drew a door. Through this door, she entered in a dream: “I speedily descend inside the Earth, where my imaginary friend expected me. I didn’t keep in mind any face, any color to remind me of her. But I know she was happy – she laughed a lot.”

Maybe that’s why the face of her imaginary friend turned into the artist’s face, in order to help her pass easily over the sufferings of life. “I used to follow her movements while she was dancing and told her all my secret problems.” Isolating herself from friends, after the divorce, Frida felt the need for a reliable person whom she could tell her drama. After all, what other person may be more reliable than yourself? Who else can keep your secrets so well? Who knows better the depths of your soul in order to give you the best advice, than yourself? “How much time have I spent with her? I do not know. A second or thousands of years… I was happy. I wiped the window with my hand, and she disappeared”, said Frida. The story ends when the young girl ran to the back courtyard with the secret of her imaginary friend. She hid herself at the root of a large cedar and started shouting and laughing. After 34 years of this memory, Frida paints the story of her magical friendship while being in a time of suffering, in order to bring happiness back.

“The Two Fridas” was exhibited in 1940 at the grand “International Exhibition of Surrealism” in Mexican Art Gallery of Ines Amor. Later, the painting appeared in the “Twenty centuries of Mexican art” retrospective organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico.

Salvador Dali is a preeminent figure on the wall of most well-known art museums in the world. His personality and his great ideas pulled up from his never-ending dreams made him stand out from the crowd. He always came with themes that were never used before, and if they were, the atmosphere created with the brush was definitely unique.

Dali couldn’t stay connected to only one art domain. He wanted to try them all: beginning with painting, continuing with writing in newspapers, making impossible photographs and ending in creating movies side by side with the great directors of the times. The surrealist manner he developed in his paintings, spread to the movies he created. By doing so he had not only begun a new era in the field of painting, but also in cinematography.

He first flirted with movies when the cinema industry began in 1929. For his first cinema experience, he participated in making the Un Chien Andalou (“An Andalusian Dog”) movie, with Luis Bunuel. The silent movie had a surrealist inspiration, and it presented the principles of psychic and irrational automatism. The scenes are the result of two authors who’s imagination does not leave room for any interpretation and rational logic.

The unique narrative flow that doesn’t use the initial “once upon a time” can be described in terms of then-popular “Freudian free association.” Bunuel was the one that came with the idea of making such a movie. He told Dali at a restaurant one day about a dream in which a cloud sliced the moon in half “like a razor blade slicing through an eye.” Dali was already fascinated with the world of dreams, by including them in his paintings, so he developed the idea by adding descriptions of his own dreams, such as a hand crawling with ants.

The collaboration between the two was a success from the start. They both were fascinated by what the psyche could create, and decided to write a script based on the concept of suppressed human emotions. Dali perceived this film as a figurative and intellectual revolution, as he wrote in his memoires: “The film has the success I had expected. In one evening, this film had destroyed a decade of pseudo-intellectual postwar avant-garde.” The “Honey is sweeter than blood” and “The Great Masturbator” paintings have details and symbolic elements that inspire some of the movie scenes.

The film was initially released to a limited showing in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months. After making this movie, Dali leaves France and returns to Catalonia in order to find himself. He starts painting clear and surrealist images such as photographs. These creations become typical for his style. One of these works is called “Das Ratsel der Begierde,” now housed by the Monaco Pinakothek der Moderne.

The Surrealists become even more fascinated by the Catalonian painter’s talent after he begins working for the second time with Luis Bunuel for the film “L’Âge d’or” (“Golden Age”). If during their firt movie, Bunuel and Dali had a great connection, now they come with different ideas in how to make the movie. Fascinated by the solemnity of Catholicism, Dali wants to introduce “many archbishops and relics” in the film. Bunuel perceives these ideas as a movement against the clergy.

Therefor, because of the different interpretation of the script and the violent episodes during the first screenings of the film at Studio 28, the two artists stop collaborating. By the time the film went into production, Bunuel and Dali had a falling out, and so the painter had nothing to do with the actual making of “The Golden Age.”

However, the film scandalized the public and was withdrawn from the market. A group of young right-wing extremists destroyed the hall in which the movie was projected. Dali exhibits his own works in the cinema foyer, along with other surrealist artists. The only painting saved from the fury of the demonstrators was “Invisible Woman sleeping, horse and lion.” Dali offers an explanation for this film:

“Writing together with Bunuel for the topics in ‘The Golden Age,’ I wanted to present the ‘conduct’ of a man hunting for love through degrading and patriotic human ideals, and other miserable mechanisms of reality “.

However, Dali doesn’t give up on his cinematic passion, and he continues to collaborate with great directors until the late 70s. In 1945, the artist creates the scenography for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, “Spellbound,” which is based by Francis Beeding’s novel, “The House of Dr. Edwards.”

Painting should be easy. Feelings on canvas. Deep struggles along a poor life. Dreams of a far away childhood. The pain of the body or of a broken heart. All of these made great themes for paintings. However, it is not enough to have a miserable life and just crave it on the canvas. You have to know techniques. Most of the great painters explored many styles.

Paul Klee is the artist who discovered colors after being trapped for many years in the black-and-white style of drawing. After becoming a painter, he put down in his memoirs the methods he adopted in order to make his paintings.

At the beginning of his artistic career, in 1903, Klee begun working on a cycle of eleven etchings, called ‘Inventionen’. These were his first experiments that lasted until 1905. The ‘Inventionen’ works were part of an international exhibit of the Munich Secession, in June 1906. The mechanism was rather simple. He drew with a needle on a blackened pane of glass. From this Klee developed his glass-pane technique that had the attention on the contrast between dark and light. This technique was applied on fifty-seven art works.

Klee and wrote about his technique in his diary:

1. Cover the pane evenly with white tempera, perhaps by spraying on a diluted mixture
2. After it has dried, scratch the drawing into it with a needle
3. Cover the back with black or colored areas.”

The spray used by Klee in his earlier ‘Inventionen’ is later applied on canvas. He covered part of the paper with a stencil and sprayed the free places with water colors.

Another experiment in Klee’s early years was with colors. The content of a picture such as a landscape was not important, but the shapes were. His first attempt in including colors in his paintings is by using dark tonalities. He also combined the graphic techniques and used both charcoal and watercolor, such as in “In the Ostermundingen Quarry, Two Cranes”, made in 1907.

Later he started applying one layer of paint on top of another in his colored works, in order to attain certain tones.

Despite his attempts to reproduce landscapes, the abstraction is the style that made him famous. Klee describes his view on abstraction in his diaries: “Abstract? Being abstract as a painter is not the same as abstracting natural objective ways of comparison but, independent of these possible forms of comparison, is based on the extraction of pictorially pure relations: light and dark, color to light and dark, color to color, long to short, broad to narrow.”

So Klee describes the abstraction as a requirement on how the artist paints a picture and not that of the picture’s message to the public. This idea Klee included in his work “In the Kairouan-style”, a painting made after his journey to Tunisia, that lasted twelve days in 1914.

The oil transfer drawing is another of Klee’s techniques developed during his lifetime. Aided by a piece of paper covered with black oil paint, he transferred a drawing onto another piece of paper or surface used for painting. The lines of the tracing appear slightly blurred. The pressure applied in tracing made smudged patches that he didn’t let out from the picture, but included them too. Afterward, the artist added watercolors. He used this technique in the painting “The Tightrope Walker,” made in 1923.
Paul Klee’s experiments included, in his maturity, psychological theories, such as the one developed by Ernst Mach and written in the book “The Analysis of the Sensations and the Relations of the Physical to the Psychic.” One of his paintings that shows Mach’s ideas is “monsieur Pearly Pig”. The theory says that, although a square and a rhombus are identical, they are not perceived as such. The rhombus appears in movement and rather larger than the square. In order to counteract this, in his painting, Klee enlarges the square so the viewer perceives them as equal.

In the end is seems that a painter’s style is not made out of one technique, but a sum. Klee made numerous experiments during his lifetime in order to be satisfied with his creations. The fact that he was his own critic made his search through different styles and techniques more ardent. Nevertheless, this quest was not in vain for he found his own style. Just as a man’s personality and character are polished according to the events he encounters in his lifetime.