#not me writing an entire impressionism meta but alas LMFAO

[shouyuus]

omg new theme!!! i love van gogh too!! aHHHH. care to share more about why impressionism paintings are a favourite? 🎤🎤 -- @anonymilk

milk!!! u always ask the best questions TBH

for me, it's actually a pretty selfish reason (at least in the beginning it was) but basically i've taken traditional art classes for like. almost my entire life. and while i studied a lot of different mediums (pencil, colored pencil, water color, gouache, acrylics, etc) oil painting has always been my fav. and during my painting classes, we were asked to pick pieces of art to copy, to learn the techniques and styles behind the paintings.

(cut for length omf im so sry i can yap about impressionism all day)

and i was never patient enough (or technically skilled enough tbh) to copy renaissance paintings, bc im actually quite garbage at painting people, so i went with a bunch of impressionism/post-impresisonism paintings like van gogh and gauguin, monet and manet, renoir and degas, and the list goes on. but through this, i grew to REALLY love impressionistic art, and how you can clearly see its an interpretation, and its not shy about broadcasting that fact. they're not trying to create a picture-perfect vision of the person/place/thing they're painting, but rather to elicit some sort of emotional resonance. there's a story in the painting (not to say that there aren't stories and interpretive strokes in traditional portraiture or landscape art, but u know what i mean), and it forces you to try and reckon with the kind of message the artist was trying to send.

as for van gogh, specifically i adore him bc of this one line that i truly forget where i heard it from but it goes something like "he took all of his sadness and suffering and turned it into something vibrant, something beautiful" which sdlksjdf!! idk JUST spoke??? to me? bc. i've dealt with depression my ENTIRE life, and i can understand the art that comes from being in the depths of despair.

and the thought that that kind of suffering -- the endless, spiraling, black-hole kind -- could be channeled into something synonymous with beauty and movement... it made me hopeful that maybe all the hurt that i was personally going thru didn't just have to be an unwanted thing that i suffered through in silence.

that it could be something beautiful, or that it already is.

it touches on a few linked concepts that i rly adore, not just in painting but in classical literature, in myths and folklore, in religion and also just in every day life -- that beauty is pain, that love is a sort of cruelty, but that both those things might be turned into art that lingers long after the artist is gone, to go on and incite conversations in the future, to inspire those who want to be inspired, and to show people that they aren't alone in this darkness.

that perhaps the worst parts of you are what make u human. and that's the most beautiful, memorable, artistic thing of all.