Romanticism “was an artistic and intellectual movement which took place in Europe between the late 18th and mid-19th centuries.” It started with the poets such as “William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” It continued into the 19th century, with romantic poets coming into the scene. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance and idealisation. Some other characteristics of romanticism is a “deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature a general happiness over reason, an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic“. In photography, it is known as the romantic period. It was a reaction to the social, political and aristocratic norms of the Enlightenment; Romantics celebrated the spontaneity, imagination, and the purity of nature.
J.M.W Turner
Joseph Mallord William Turner, (born April 23rd, 1775 in London, England and died December 19th, 1851, London), was an English Romantic landscape painter whose “expressionistic studies of light, colour, and atmosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity“. From 1792, he spent his summers touring the country in search of subjects, filling his sketchbooks with drawings to finish later on with watercolours. His early work is topographical (concerned with the accurate depiction of places). From 1796, Turner started to use oil paintings as well as watercolours. The first, Fishermen at Sea (1796), is a moonlight scene and was praised by a present critic as having the work “of an original mind.”
Turner’s work fits in with the theme variation and similarity because he explores light and colour and presents this throughout his amazing paintings. He uses light as a starting point to create his art work – he was an artist of the 18th and 19th century which is another stem of inspiration for my project. I like how Turner has created his work based on light, and has used colour to incorporate this idea into his paintings well. I am intrigued by this as I want to explore light and shadows, and on the light aspect of my project, I think I would like to take an approach like Turner, using colour to create unique images that are influenced with light (and shadows).