Winslow Homer (1836-1910)

Research:

Winslow Homer was born in Boston in 1836 and became known for his marine subjects as a landscape printer and printmaker.  He is a self-trained artist who started off working as a commercial printmaker.  Homer painted anecdotal Civil War paintings in 1863, but his work towards 1865 actually showed understanding of the war’s impact.  Throughout the 1870s he indulged in artistic experimentation and created a wide variety of works.  Homer was interested in serial imagery, incorporating outdoor light, simple forms, and loose brushwork.  He mastered oil and watercolour painting.  By the 1880s, Homer’s art brought a deeper level of intensity through observation of English people.  He took inspiration from his time in solitude for his paintings.  His later works concentrated on the sea, and were dynamically composed to capture the appearance and emotion of the water.  The skillful brushwork, depth of feeling, and subtlety of modernist abstraction make these sea paintings so appreciated and valuable.  

Opinion:

I find Winslow Homer’s paintings thoughtful and stylistic.  The subtle depth and detail he portrays brings a certain beauty to his pieces.  In my opinion, his watercolour painting, “Canoe in the Rapids,” is a great example of his ability to express the movement and realism of water.  I really like the style of the water, and the different values Homer uses to represent the reflections.  He’s even able to illustrate the foam and water spray of the crashing waves.  I also like this painting because it demonstrates aerial perspective (the detailed foreground contracts with the further layers of background becoming more faint), which I just practiced in my gouache painting.  My favourite characteristic of this piece is the colour in the water, as the warm accents give a sense unification to the scene.  His watercolour paintings inspire me to paint more with the medium, and experiment more with water depictions.

Sources

Metmuseum.org, www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/homr/hd_homr.htm.

Metmuseum.org, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11122.

“National Gallery of Art.” Winslow Homer in the National Gallery of Art, www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/winslow-homer-in-the-national-gallery-of-art.html.

“Winslow Homer.” Winslow Homer – The Complete Works, www.winslow-homer.com/.

“Winslow Homer Artworks & Famous Paintings.” The Art Story, www.theartstory.org/artist/homer-winslow/artworks/.

Image credit

Image 1:  https://www.wikiart.org/en/winslow-homer

Image 2: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11122

Image 3: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11130

Image 4: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-winslow-homer-greatest-american-painter-19th-century

Image 5: https://www.wikiart.org/en/winslow-homer/canoe-in-the-rapids