University of Southern California : The Creative Flow.
ENPNewswire-July 29, 2022--University of Southern California : The Creative Flow
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Release date- 28072022 - Water, simultaneously vital to human life and one of our deadliest foes, has inspired the human imagination in compelling ways since before the written word.
In the summer afternoons of 1869, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir set up their easels overlooking La Grenouillere (The Frog Pond), a picturesque outdoor floating bar and restaurant on the River Seine, not far from Paris.
In short, quick brushstrokes, the two artists captured the play of sunlight on the water and Parisians enjoying the idyllic surroundings.
The water changed minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour as the sun sank and shadows dappled the river's surface. Monet and Renoir painted the same subject from almost the same perspective, but their canvases showed very different depictions.
This was the start of a groundbreaking artistic movement eventually dubbed 'impressionism,' which tossed out long-cherished rules about precision and realism in art and ushered in an era that instead valued an artist's individual perception.
It was such compelling work that the formerly all-powerful French art institution L'Academie des Beaux Arts, which initially rejected these paintings, saw its influence decline as the impressionist movement eventually gained enormous popularity, leaving its detractors in the dust. Water was the catalyst for this emerging technique. Monet's depiction of water reflections heralded a new way to think about brushwork and painting.
'When a painter paints water, they are studying the in-between of things. Water helps you to understand a new vision, a fresh way of understanding your own particular perspective,' says USC Dornsife's Hector Reyes, associate professor (teaching) of art history. 'Water complicates what we think we know about the world.'
Humanity's relationship with water has never been easy, which perhaps explains why it has played such an outsized role as a creative muse.
'Water is ambiguous. We need it to live, but too much of it can kill us,' says USC Dornsife's Kristiana Willsey, lecturer of anthropology and folklore expert. Good rains make for fertile harvests. Too much rain and seeds, homes - even people - can be washed away.
This duality has inspired storytelling and art for millennia.
'Our earliest work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, contains a great flood. The Bible's Book of Genesis tells of a universal flood in which humanity gets washed away,' says Anthony Kemp, associate professor of Englishat USC Dornsife. Modern works like the 1995 film Waterworld or J. G. Ballard's science fiction novel The...
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