Aside from being beautiful, they’re amazing glimpses into visual processing into the human brain. Impressionism is, at its core, lossy compression, right?

(To digress a bit, I look at Impressionism as a reaction against photography, which says to itself “Look, this camera can capture direct reality far better than I ever could. So what is my role as a painter and artist, now? My brush can never get the colors quite right, the perspective and angle quite perfect. Where is my niche, that I am not obsolete?”.

So, impressionism says “my rough strokes can capture the spirit of reality better than the overt literal capture of a camera & lens”.)

So, impressionism is lossy compression, like a too-small .jpg (or, perhaps more accurately, one of those 8-bit tribute albums. It throws away information while still attempting to retain the overall picture. But the information it chooses to throw out seems to imply a wonderful exploitation of the human visual perception system.

Sporadic dashes of green become ship masts, stacatto jabs of orange the sun, vague blotches of purple become the fog. But not, not overtly.

(Classic computer vision & object recognition approaches would certainly work quite poorly on paintings like these. I’d be halfway curious to try to design a system that could do it well).

I wonder what it was like for the first folks exploring this technique. Especially because, standing so close to the canvas, it’s easy to see the literal but hard to get the gestalt.

Monet never knew
              he was painting his "Lilies" for
      a lady from the Chicago Art Institute
          who went to France and filmed
              today's lilies
              by the "Bridge at Giverny"
                  a leaf afloat among them
      the film of which now flickers
          at the entrance to his framed visions
              with a Debussy piano soundtrack
flooding with a new fluorescence (fleur-essence?)
      the rooms and rooms
              of waterlilies

Monet caught a Cloud in a Pond
               in 1903
      and got a first glimpse
                      of its lilies and for twenty years returned
      again and again to paint them
          which now gives us the impression
              that he floated thru life on them
                              and their reflections
          which he also didn�t know
              we would also have occasion
                          to reflect upon
Anymore than he could know
          that John Cage would be playing a
              "Cello with Melody-driven Electronics"
                      tonight at the University of Chicago
And making those Lilies shudder and shed
                                  black light

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1950s

The thing I like most about this poem is the underlying conflict between expressionism/impressionism, but how that’s totally unnecessary to aesthetically enjoying the poem. Irony?

(aside: Poetry sucks in html. This is the best fix I could find. My apologies.)