Harmonies of Light

An art appreciation blog.
White Doors, Vilhelm Hammershoi (1905) While his subject-matter may seem repetitious, Hammershoi is the master of subtly and subtle changes. His style of painting which seems influenced by Dutch genre artists like Vermeer and the impressionists, remains the same throughout, but his aesthetic is rich in the bridges it creates. The strange stillness of his paintings, especially the ones without human subjects, are almost surreal and his compositions and portraits, most notably when we only see the back of the subject’s head, are abstract in their experiments with compositional convention. Empty space dominates the paintings. Hammershoi’s muted emotion are emblematic to the mono no aware in Japanese visual art. The silence of his paintings are so great that you can almost hear it.

White Doors, Vilhelm Hammershoi (1905)

While his subject-matter may seem repetitious, Hammershoi is the master of subtly and subtle changes. His style of painting which seems influenced by Dutch genre artists like Vermeer and the impressionists, remains the same throughout, but his aesthetic is rich in the bridges it creates. The strange stillness of his paintings, especially the ones without human subjects, are almost surreal and his compositions and portraits, most notably when we only see the back of the subject’s head, are abstract in their experiments with compositional convention.

Empty space dominates the paintings. Hammershoi’s muted emotion are emblematic to the mono no aware in Japanese visual art. The silence of his paintings are so great that you can almost hear it.

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