Research On The Comparison Of The Beach-themed Paintings Between Joaquín Sorolla And Eric Fishl

This study takes the Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla in the19th century and thecontemporary American artist Eric Fishl in the20th century as research objectives, trying tofigure out the differences of their works in the formal language of painting and artistic spiritsby analyzing contrastively their beach-themed works of widely different styles. Firstly, theauthor does some research into the differences of four aspects including the composition of apicture, the painting modeling, the brush stoke and the color, by analyzing the two artists’formal language with scientific ways of iconology, comparative theory and psychology. Then,the different mental demands of the two artists are discussed separately. The artistic spirit ofJoaquín Sorolla lies in the eulogization and praise of the life in hometown, Bavaria, by thesea, while that of Eric Fishl focuses on recording and the introspection of a particular class’s(the American middle class) subjective state. In the mean time, this study discusses the arteducation backgrounds and art experience of each of them and expounds the impacts from thedevelopment of the background of painting by analyzing the features of time and artenvironment where the two artists stood, thus revealing the springhead where the otherness ofthe beach-themed paintings of Joaquín Sorolla and Eric Fishl comes. As for the enlightmentvalue of the comparison, the author, still taking these two artists as examples, to express thewhole through details, briefly summarizes and combs the two aspects including therelationship between the choices of the formal languages of their works and the mentaldemands of them and also some thoughts on artistic innovation. The author sums up theexperience got in this research, hoping to offer guidance for the future study and artisticcreation.