The interim verdict: your passions lie with impressionism. Impressionism seems to be the most poetic style in fine arts. The subjects are close to realism, however while realists depicted the reality through developing typical subjects, impressionists seized beautiful moments of life and conveyed reality as a fleeting ephemeral sensation. Their paintings produce the same feeling as the view of a person or a thing you see for the fisrt time in your life and you try to work out the general idea of it, no details and no strong feelings yet. It’s like you enjoy the view from the train that is flying through the forests and the fields and the cities, and you don’t care for details. You are there just to enjoy the ride.

An impressionist person is a bundle of skin-deep emotions, perceptions and experiences, and the impressionist paintings thus produce the effect of instability, fragility and evanescence  – they depict a moment that is fying by and gone in a second, not the steady generalized ideas. This philosophical and aesthectic background shows through the stories and the artistic subject.

The impressionists chose to immortalize fleeting moments of everyday life rather than mythological, biblical or historical subjects. They were the first to leave the studios, and walk out into the daylight and into the streets. Their subjects are wildly dynamic and seem to reflect the movement itself – for instance when depicting a carriage passing by, they give you the flashing sunlight on the spokes, not the detailed view of the wheel, and so these canvases burst with sunlight, the flecks and diffusing contours – as if you saw a something and looked away without giving attention to detail. It is this translucent passing impression, the fleeing moment that the impressionists strive to capture.

The composition is often asymmetrical, erratic, the artists loved to explore the unusual perspective – “bird’s eye” or “frog’s eye”. They used pure colors and thick, visible brushwork; the colours are juxtaposed rather than mixed – they actually mix in the eye of the viewer that makes that paintings vibrant and the subject elusive. The impressionist paintings do not recreate the reality, but the perception of the real scenes witnessed for the first time – the perception and the first impressions. It’s like you had a glance at something but never looked closer and focused to see the details.