1.

Portrait

A portrait is the recreation of the shapes that makes a face, by catching their personality as well as their
looks. They can be painted, drawn, printed, sculpted or photographed. A portrait must focus on one
person or a group, and try to show what makes the individual unique and special. In the past a portrait
often showed the status rather than the personality. Nowadays the problem is how to capture the spirit
of the individual.

You can analyze a portrait by:

 Group or single
 Background: interior or exterior
 Pose: side face or profile, ¾ face, front face.
 Head only, head and shoulders, half or full size
 Symbols: what is the person holding and what does it mean
 Expression
 Costume and accessories (like jewellery for example).

2. Post-Impressionism (Van Gogh)

Van Gogh: was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter. His works include portraits, self-portraits, landscapes,
still life, sunflowers, etc. he drew as a child but spent years in ill health and solitude, not painting until
his late twenties. He moved to Paris in 1886 and discovered the French Impressionists. His paintings
grew brighter in color as he developed a style that became fully realized in 1888. Art historians see an
artist deeply frustrated by the inactivity and incoherence caused by frequent mental sickness. In 1890 he
committed suicide after years of anxiety, poverty and mental illness. The Sunflowers are among his most
famous painting.

Post-Impressionism: It’s a French movement that emerged as a reaction against Impressionism and its
concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and color. Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism
while rejecting its limitations: they continued using vivid colors, but were more inclined to emphasize
geometric forms, distort forms for an expressive effect. They wanted to portray emotion and intellect as
well as the visual imagery. Pointillism is also part of post-impressionism but it grew into a movement
named as neo-impressionism.

The most famous post-impressionists are: Paul Gauguin (important artist in the symbolist movement
and his bold use of color led to the synthetics style of art), Paul Cezanne (he used repetitive and
exploratory brushstrokes. He is well known for his landscapes, still life and portraits), Van Gogh, Henri
Rousseau and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

3. Pontillism

This technique used small dots or points of color with clear, defined edges. The choice of color were
calculated decisions. Chevreul studied about the relativity of color and his theories influenced Seurat
and pointillism. Chevreul wanted people to seen the interaction between colors. Contrasts happen when
two adjacent colors intermingle, changing how they appear. Pointillism used these concepts of color-
mixing and applying complementary colors to achieve the strongest effect. Color was a key to the
pointillism technique as well as brush strokes and form, and they painted small and precise dots which
varied in size and shape and when seen from some distance, they mixed optically to create the overall
picture.