Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt's drawings, paintings,and prints focus mainly on women in their everyday lives, with a concentration on women as mothers and their children . Her images are often of intimate, personal moments. Many of her images are of recognizable, comforting, and familiar everyday events.

Artist's Website Through National Gallery of Art:
http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/ggcassattptg/ggcassattptg-main2.html#overview

Review:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B03E1D9133DF934A35751C1A9659C8B63

Galleries and Museums:
National Gallery of Art

I first started to look at Mary Cassatt's work when I was in elementary school. I was constantly fascinated by her imagery, maybe because it was familiar and comforting. Many of her images are intamate portraits of women and children. Recently I began to look at her work again in relation to my project. My imagery deals with family and their most precious and personal moments. At first her imagery is what struck me, the actual subjects. After taking a longer look I began to pay more attention to her choice of colors and brushstrokes. She spent most of her life in Paris, and studied with Degas. Naturally, her style was largely influenced by French Impressionism. Her whispy, quick brushstrokes give a sense of immediacy. Her work isn't just about conveying the time and events that were taking place, but rather the feelings and emotions that were present in those private moments. This struck me as being similar to some of the pictures I have taken from my family videos. Each picture is a moment, frozen in time. One only gets the impression of that moment through my images. This is partly because of the distortion from the image being transferred from film to video, to tv screen and then back onto film or onto digital. In many of these photographs the image is hazy and sometimes hard to read. Even with this distortion, one gets a sense of emotion from the image. Impressionist were interested with recording the moment and the emotional charge of that moment, without adding intricate detail of the environment and subject. This is what I hope to accomplish with my work.