Tonalism

Spanning the late 1880s to the 1920s, tonalism incorporated the use of subtle colour tones, and to quote the man who ‘wrote the book’ on tonalism, David Adams Cleveland, it is “an art about the feeling or mood evoked by the arrangement of landscape elements to project an emotion, rather than a realistic or representational depiction of a certain place.“

In my own application of tonalism I try to stir the feeling of timelessness of a landscape. I have felt it when I gazed pensively over a meadow and felt as if I could be anyone standing there at any time period… an ancestor from a bygone era.

Tonalism really evolved from the French Barbizon movement which placed the emphasis on atmosphere and shadow and harmonized nature with man.

“While the historical roots of tonalism lie mostly with nineteenth-century American painters, tonalism’s branches extend across multiple time periods and geographies. Many twentieth-century artists worked in some measure under the influence of its aesthetic principles. Artists as diverse as Yves Klein, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt and Wolf Kahn have all been said to have painted to an extent in a tonalist mode; their works are united by a restricted (if not monochrome) palette, subtle modulations of closely related values, and a deeply conceptual and/or emotional/psychological (what used to be called “poetic”) approach.” (Tonalism.com)