Oil Painting and Impressionism - Inspiration of American oil painter Jeff Starr. So why Jeff Starr, Oil Painter? I've been drawing and creating art since I was a little kid, trying different mediums along the way. Most five-year-olds don't work in oil, so obviously at first it was pencils, watercolors, pen and ink.

I started painting in my teens, but my impatience made me paint in acrylics. What I liked about acrylic paints had nothing to do with result - I'm ashamed to admit that the only reason I painted in acrylics was ease of cleanup and quick drying time. My OCD made me anxious to finish a painting ASAP, so I liked the idea that I could apply a second coat in a matter of hours.

In time, however, I found acrylics to be limiting. I wanted to display deep, rich colors and textures and was never really happy with the final product. In the meantime, I married an oil painter, Starrina, and was able to watch her in action. I was jealous of the rich results she achieved with her oil painting so I switched. Like any other craft, it took a while to get a handle on the techniques particular to oil paints, but 10 years later I can't imagine using any other medium.

So why Impressionism? I guess it's a combination of things. When I was a kid, I wanted to do Realism. I tried. And tried. And tried. Something was always a little off. People always said good things about my artwork, but deep inside I knew that being a Realist wasn't for me. In the meantime, my parents were introducing me to great art. We had a board game when I was about 9 called "Masterpiece". Part of the game is a deck of cards that contains famous works of art on the front and all of the vital info on the back. It proved to be very educational to me. Not only did I learn all of these wonderful works of art, but I also learned what my personal tastes were.

As we played "Masterpiece", the paintings that grabbed me were the ones by Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cassatt, Matisse. I couldn't put a finger on it, but somehow the Impressionistic style clicked with me on a visceral level. When I gave up trying to be a Realist and instead painted in the style that had captivated me as a child, Impressionism was right in my wheelhouse. Suddenly I wasn't struggling with my art, it was just flowing. Now painting was a relaxing pleasure not a frustrating struggle. Ever since I started focusing on Impressionism, painting has become something I look forward to every day.

Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.

Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.

Impressionism also describes art created in this style, but outside of the late 19th century time period.

Radicals in their time, early Impressionists broke the rules of academic painting. They began by giving colours, freely brushed, primacy over line, drawing inspiration from the work of painters such as Eugene Delacroix. They also took the act of painting out of the studio and into the modern world. Previously, still lifes and portraits as well as landscapes had usually been painted indoors. The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting en plein air. Painting realistic scenes of modern life, they emphasized vivid overall effects rather than details. They used short, 'broken' brush strokes of pure and unmixed colour, not smoothly blended, as was customary, in order to achieve the effect of intense colour vibration.