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If you want to create abstract expressionist art, there are several techniques, ideas and methodologies you must learn before you can understand this modern art movement. Abstract expressionist art strikes directly at the heart of things, giving artists the liberation to explore their emotions and convey their personal interaction with art. Play, explore and enjoy the freedom this art form gives you.
Art has the unique ability to express the innermost emotions in a physical form. This unique ability was the unifying theme among the Expressionists, a group of early 20th Century artists who rejected realism in favor of painting a subjective world that represented emotion rather than observation. Expressionist art can be powerful, moving and cathartic. To create Expressionist art is to take an internal emotional state and externalize it so it can be creatively shared with others.
The Dark Ages was a period in European history that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 A.D. and ended with the beginning of the Renaissance during the 14th century. This era was called the "Dark Ages" by Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarca, who coined the phrase to describe the lost cultures of the Greek and Romans after the Roman Empire fell. Filmmakers and movie producers have created motion pictures based on the historical and fictional accounts of the Dark Ages. These films help people to understand how people lived during this period.
If you think of Expressionism in art, you perhaps think of the tortured, twisted figures in portraits by the Austrian painter Egon Schiele or of the frenzied Berlin street scenes painted by Ludwig Kirchner. Expressionism exposed, in very physical terms, the trauma of being vulnerably human in the troubled years preceding and following World War I. The Expressionist impulse in painting is found not only in the human figure or in depictions of the modern urban environment but in representations of the natural landscape, too.
If you could pull your innermost, deepest emotions out of yourself and display them for all the world to see, would you? That's exactly what Abstract Expressionist painters sought to accomplish. Heavily influenced by Cubism and Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism was not about the actual object being painted. It was more about what the artist felt while he painted.
