Artwork | Impressionism Nasturtiums, Gustave Caillebotte (c. 1892)By Moreuil Wood
December 10, 2008 |
Caillebotte's composition nuances the relationship between image and its material space, its color, texture, and reaches toward the dreamlike basis of the conscious imagination. |
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Nasturtiums, c. 1892 -Gustave Caillebotte |
Nasturtiums is more complex than it appears on the surface. Its beautifully varied natural blue, lavender, green, and red silks, trace the metaphysical strands of color into a visual image, weaving an extraordinary poetic image, which curves beyond the surface into the nature of light.
Caillebotte's composition nuances the relationship between image and its material space, its color, texture, shadow, and reaches toward the dreamlike basis of the conscious imagination and the inner landscape of what we are.
The image moves into this space, not, however, by defining or explaining, but by involving us in the continuum and resiliency that is derived from natural cycle and the nature of pattern.
In Nasturtiums, the physical evidence of that spirit is in the union of nature and image, which has its origins in the long formative period of the human mind, when we first consciously manipulated language, art, design, and fashion into an intellectual and complex metaphor for the interlace of leaves, trees, vines, color, and cycles of light and shadow.