Impasto Research

Impasto is a technique commonly used in fine art where the artist puts the paint so thickly onto the canvas it becomes three-dimensional.  They’ll use a brush or a palette knife to put it on and sometimes mix the paint right on the canvas.  The effect is that the thick brush and knife strokes affect the way the light plays on the canvas and the texture is much more dramatic or expressive.  It’s best painted with oils because of their thickness and long drying time, but acrylics can also be used.  It doesn’t quite work with the thinner paints like watercolor though.  The brush strokes can vary according to how broad or skinny the brush is but the most common way to paint impasto is using very impressionistic, broad strokes and leaving much of the detail to chance and imagination.

One artist I admire is Arnold Chao, a modern artist from San Francisco.  I like the individually unique technique he uses.  The brush strokes in his abstract or landscape paintings are often very thin and swirled. He turn the brush around in curves to create even more of an interesting texture with the thick paint.  Also, much of his work is loose and slightly vague, as if the viewer is seeing the scene through a heavily textured glass.  I like the sunset especially.

Another artist I found is named Maryanne Jacobsen.  Her subjects are primarily landscapes and still lives when it comes to impasto and I’ve found those make the best impasto paintings because not a lot of small smooth detail is needed.

And the last artist I researched was Marcus Krackowizer another modern contemporary impressionistic artist.  I especially love his artwork because the impasto paint he uses for his work is always full of many different colors and up close the paintings will look like abstract works of art made up of gobs of brushed paint but they become something beautiful from farther away.    He does a lot of landscape or city scenes in thick oil, though most of his nonrepresentational art is in thickly applied and almost tie-dyed looking acrylic.   It’s amazing what marks these artists can make on the canvas.