This piece is a digital painting from the Stuttgart subway, done on my way home one late Friday evening.
Lately I have been inspired by the American Impressionists, especially the Boston School painters. Their way of painting is interesting because it is situated at the meeting point of realism and impressionism. The painters of the Boston School treated a painting first and foremost as a two-dimensional arrangement of color spots and not as a grouping of objects.
If executed masterfully, an abstract-looking sketch made up of a small number of colored spots can turn into a fully realistic rendition of the scene over time. The final painting retains a certain sense of poetry – a feeling that the spots the painting is made up of might disintegrate at any moment. I have tried to apply this way of thinking in this painting.
What is even more interesting is that this way of painting only started to be explored during the 17th century by painters like Velázquez and Vermeer, and fully developed during the 19th century.
If you want to learn more about this topic, I recommend you check out Paul Ingbretson's YouTube channel.