Pierre Bonnard, The Dining Room in the Country, 1913

I’m a plein air landscape artist and I do some still life paintings when the weather is bad or it’s just too cold to stand outside for three hours. I live in Minnesota. Today, I can say that I paint in the tradition of painterly realism, but it took some time for me to identify the tradition—painterly realism—that I feel most aligned with. In college, I was infatuated with the French Impressionists, and with Pierre Bonnard in particular. Then as now, color and light are nearly the first things that draw my attention to a scene. The Impressionists used broken color to capture the sensation of light. Bonnard was actually considered a Post-Impressionist painter and criticized by some because he broke with his contemporaries, developing his own style. Reviewing an exhibit of Bonnard’s work, Jed Perl wrote:

“Bonnard is the most…