Last week I talked a little bit more about where abstract art came from. I sited the advent of the Camera and the concept of souvenirs being brought back to Europe by Adventurers to distant continents over 100 years or more ago.  Today I’m going to talk about the influence of Japanese Painting on the Modern Era of painting.

Japanese Paintings were totally different than European Painting. The picture plane was flat - in other words it did not incorporate the illusion, and rules, of perspective that European painters had been working with since the first representation of perspective by Italian artist Brunelleschi in about 1415. And the flat or high colour palette used in Japan was considered quite bizarre compared to colour theory and the mixing of paint being used in Europe at that time.

Specifically I refer to Van Gogh’s painting Room at Arles of 1889. It was painted with high, or bright, colour and with broken rules ofnperspective. The perspective, or picture plane, is tipped forward so far that it looks like the bed could slide forward out of the painting. Part of the reasoning behind this might’ve been so that the viewer could see the entire bedroom with all its contents, rather than the traditional painting of the illusion of a room (illusion meaning that your eye is tricked into thinking that it is looking at a painting of the bedroom as you might recognize it in real life).

So the advent of Abstract Painting and the Modern Era of Art was about artists being influenced by the Camera and the NEW world cultural references.