A Gallery of Impressionistic Photopainting: Original Works by David Lerner

Photography through an Impressionist eye

Detailed architectural domes and stone buildings under soft lighting.

The motivation for this Gallery

Thank you for visiting this site and for taking the time to read my story. While traveling in Italy in 2025, the receipt of a surprise text started a cascade. The sender was at the time standing in New York's Brooklyn Museum viewing the exhibit of "Monet in Venice." Snapshots from the exhibit accompanied the text, along with a challenge: when visiting Venice on the trip, try to photograph the city the way Monet might have seen it, and here are some ideas for inspiration.

This gallery attempts to respond to that challenge.

Impressionist-style painting of autumn trees with snow-capped mountains in the background.

Photography and Impressionism

As an artistic medium, photography can embrace both realism and post-modernist abstraction. These images try instead to reinterpret photography's representational role through the delicate brush of Impressionistic sensibility. They seek to ask: if artists of that era had today's tools, how might they have expressed themselves?

The great painters of the Renaissance, like Da Vinci, Van Eyck and Rembrandt, had conquered the intricacy and exactitude of realism, brilliantly anticipating the future story-telling power of photography. Their approach then allowed such Impressionists as Monet, Seurat and Van Gogh, centuries later, to reclaim and express in paint the artistic power of metaphor, imagination and emotion.

Why Impressionistic Photopainting?

The clarity, precision and hyper-realism of digital photography can be more declarative or descriptive of an artist's vision than they are suggestive or evocative. The holistic "re-presentational" techniques developed by Impressionist painters, by contrast, are wonderfully suited for that purpose -- they let the viewer approach the work at varying depths and so explore subtle differences of composition and execution. Creative use of modern digital tools similarly can help transport the viewer of photographic works to the metaphoric domain of Impressionism.

While there is no overarching message in this collection, or in any individual image, we hope that you, through your unique perspectives, can appreciate these original works and the endeavor to "re-present" scenes through an Impressionist eye. Please enjoy.