Remembering The Genius Behind Rembrandt Paintings
Many of today’s current generation artists still study the styles and methods made renowned by a artist who lived exclusively in Holland from 1606 to his death in 1669. Rembrandt van Rijn spent his entire life in his beloved country of Holland, creating not only works of art, but innovating methods that are being studied in today’s art schools. What exactly sets Rembrandt paintings apart and is able to make his paintings fetch millions in today’s industry? There was hardly anything different about the subjects that he would likely use, one could argue, and even artists of his time were surely utilizing approaches that were similar.
Rembrandt was a rather keen observer of details simply as it is with most successful artists, capturing the details in the paintings he created using subjects that consisted mostly of himself, his wife, along with a few other female companions. Some of his other favorite subjects were both historical and Biblical figures, and he was amazing at capturing and rendering the complexities of his subject’s facial expressions whether they were obvious expressions of joy and sorrow or even the more subtle and complex expressions of consternation and contemplation. He was uncanny in his ability to bring out the character of his subjects by weaving drama into several of his pieces, resulting in excellent Rembrandt oil paintings.
He accomplished this drama by alternating layering approaches to build up colour, as well as bring out the subject from its background with the use of strong contrasts. Rembrandt created some of his finest known portraits employing techniques of layering such as “impasto,” which laid the paint in a very thick layer. Other times the layer of colour would probably just be a result of a thin glaze of paint that was barely there. Although he did use brighter colors, especially for the subjects themselves, the majority of the palette would probably consist of somber colors like brown, black, gray and white. Another technique that is strongly associated with Rembrandt is called “chiaroscuro” which employed powerful contrasts to produce a impression of drama in his paintings and draw the eye to the subject. He wasn’t the first to have utilised it though, with Caravaggio who lived from 1573 to 1610 being recognized as one of the rather first to have made a mark with it. Still, Rembrandt used it quite well in almost all of his famous oil paintings, setting the subject against a dark background and bathing it in light. Even his earlier years as a student constructed etchings that showcased Caravaggio’s influence in these simpler works of contrasting lights and darks.
December 28, 2011
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Posted by Jam Man
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