My work was inspired by Paul Gaugin, an Post-Impressionist artist who was known for his bold colours and synthetic style artwork, but wasn’t appreciated until after his death in 1903. He was one of the major inspirations for famous artists such as Picasso and Mattise. He was a symbologist as a painter, sculptor, writer and print maker and was closely linked to the symbolist movement throughout his post impressionism years.
The ‘Seed of the Areoi’ was one of Paul Gaugin’s pieces. (See Image Right) There is a range of new colours being used in this painting, all that stand out and clash against each other. During the impressionism movement, new colours we being 
imported into colour tubes. These new colours and dyes were very bold and bright and went well with the popular brush technique at the time which was short brush strokes. This helped with the expressionism features of the impressionist movement as during this time photography came about, leading to less artists being commissioned for portraits, the artists then had to become more emotional and symbolic in their work. Additionally expressionism leads onto the status of artists in the society at this time where artists were social misfits and did not fit in to the new era and most artists were then considered to be anti establishment.
Another main feature of Gaugin’s work and most impressionist/post impressionist work is the broken barriers of realism, using the short brush strokes and unblending nature of colour, the anatomy of the subject matters are some how almost distorted. This is because yet again, photography was introduced.
A lot of impressionist/post impressionist art involves water as a subject matter, and/or nature in all of its glory, the use of colours makes still breaks down the realism but keeps the expressionism and symbolism, especially since colour wise, artists would avoid using black and instead used other colours to shade, improving colour theory as we know it today.
Unit 05 - Contextual Influences 