South America Continent Of Contrasts

Maria Bertrán, a painter born in Venezuela who immigrated to the United States in the late 1960s, splits her time between her home in Laguna Beach, California, and her studio in Provence, France. She is a consummate observer — Bertrán finds interesting scenes in street markets, harbors, building facades in populous European villages and elsewhere — and her gestural brushstrokes and daring use of vibrant color bring life to her Impressionistic works as she endeavors to communicate her deep appreciation for her radiant surroundings in her work. 

Bertrán infuses her landscape paintings with her heartfelt response to the beauty of the natural world and to her medium. “For me painting is my happy place, and it is technical but also emotional,” she has said. “It is color and joy, and I hope to share these feelings with as many people as possible through my art.”

Bertrán received her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, continuing her figurative drawing studies in Paris. In 1980, she settled in Laguna Beach. Pacific Edge Gallery, where a permanent exhibition of her work can be found, has represented the artist since 1987.

Bertrán has a deep love of working with natural light, and she is constantly seeking to capture its essence in her paintings. The artist has traveled extensively and has painted scenes from Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, the South Pacific and the United States. 

Bertrán has had numerous solo exhibitions in locales such as Aspen, Key West, Provence, Stockbridge and New York City. Her work is held in the collection of the Laguna Art Museum in California.

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In the revolutionary wake of Impressionism, artists like Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin advanced the style further while firmly rejecting its limitations. Although the artists now associated with Postimpressionist art did not work as part of a group, they collectively employed an approach to expressing moments in time that was even more abstract than that of the Impressionists, and they shared an interest in moving away from naturalistic depictions to more subjective uses of vivid colors and light in their paintings.

The eighth and final Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris in 1886, and Postimpressionism — also spelled Post-Impressionism — is usually dated between then and 1905. The term “Postimpressionism” was coined by British curator and art critic Roger Fry in 1910 at the “Manet and the Postimpressionists” exhibition in London that connected their practices to the pioneering modernist art of Édouard Manet. Many Postimpressionist artists — most of whom lived in France — utilized thickly applied, vibrant pigments that emphasized the brushstrokes on the canvas.

The Postimpressionist movement’s iconic works of art include van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889) and Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884). Seurat’s approach reflected the experimental spirit of Postimpressionism, as he used Pointillist dots of color that were mixed by the eye of the viewer rather than the hand of the artist. Van Gogh, meanwhile, often based his paintings on observation, yet instilled them with an emotional and personal perspective in which colors and forms did not mirror reality. Alongside Mary Cassatt, Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Gauguin, the Dutch painter was a pupil of Camille Pissarro, the groundbreaking Impressionist artist who boldly organized the first independent painting exhibitions in late-19th-century Paris.

The boundary-expanding work of the Postimpressionist painters, which focused on real-life subject matter and featured a prioritization of geometric forms, would inspire the Nabis, German Expressionism, Cubism and other modern art movements to continue to explore abstraction and challenge expectations for art.

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