Artist Charles Oliver Galleries of Traditional & Contemporary Fine Art

Impressionism

Often Impressionism a theory or style of painting originating and developed in France during the 1870s, characterized by concentration on the immediate visual impression produced by a scene and by the use of unmixed primary colors and small strokes to simulate actual reflected light.
Impressionism was a 19th century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists, who began 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 painting include visible brushstrokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, 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.
Painters known as Impressionists: Frédéric Bazille, Paul Cézanne (although he later broke away from the Impressionists), Edgar Degas (a realist who despised the term Impressionist, but is considered one, due to his loyalty to the group), Armand Guillaumin, Édouard Manet (who did not regard himself as an Impressionist, but is generally considered one), Claude Monet (the most prolific of the Impressionists), Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Alfred Sisley

Surrealism

Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.
1931 marked a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's Voice of Space (La Voix des airs)[4] is an example of this process, where three large spheres representing bells hang above a landscape. Another Surrealist landscape from this same year is Yves Tanguy's Promontory Palace (Palais promontoire), with its molten forms and liquid shapes. Liquid shapes became the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his The Persistence of Memory, which features the image of watches that sag as if they are melting.
The characteristics of this style - a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological - came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality".
Long after personal, political and professional tensions fragmented the Surrealist group, Magritte and Dalí continued to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray self portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced Robert Rauschenberg's collage boxes.

Abstraction

Abstract art is now generally understood to mean art that does not depict objects in the natural world, but instead uses color and form in a non-representational way.[1] In the very early 20th century, the term was more often used to describe art, such as Cubist and Futurist art, that depicts real forms in a simplified or rather reduced way—keeping only an allusion of the original natural subject. Such paintings were often claimed to capture something of the depicted objects' immutable intrinsic qualities rather than its external appearance. (See abstraction.) The more precise terms, "non-figurative art," "non-objective art," and "non-representational art" avoid any possible ambiguity.
Some of the American Abstract expressionists are purely abstract and include: Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Hans Hofmann although they were at times inspired by myth, figuration, architecture, and nature. Op Art (1962) and Minimalism (1965)[citation needed] were two recent idioms. It is, at present possible that an artist's work is seen as an individual entity rather than part of a movement. The late Yves Klein and the late John McLaughlin, and the more current Callum Innes, Sean Scully, and Yuko Shiraishi are but a few of the many abstract painters whose works can be seen today.

Structures- (geometrics, fractals, designs, mantras, etc.)

Fractal art is created by calculating fractal objects and representing the calculation results as still images, animations, music, or other media. Fractal art is usually created indirectly with the assistance of a computer, iterating through three phases: setting parameters of appropriate fractal software, executing the possibly lengthy calculation and evaluating the product.
The Geometric Style is a style of Greek art preserved largely in the form of vase painting that flourished towards the end of the Greek Dark AgesVases in the Geometric style are characterized by many horizontal bands about the circumference covering the entire vase, between these lines the geometric artist used a number of other decorative motifs such as the zigzag, the triangle and the meander. Besides abstract elements painters of this era introduced stylized depictions of humans and animals. Linear designs were the principal motif used in this period. The meander pattern was often placed in bands and used to frame the now larger panels of decoration.
Mantras originated in the Vedic religion of India, later becoming an essential part of the Hindu tradition and a customary practice within Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism. The use of mantras is now widespread throughout various spiritual movements which are based on, or off-shoots of, the practices in the earlier Eastern religions.

Portraiture 

Portrait painting is a genre in painting, where the intent is to depict the visual appearance of the subject, mostly a person, whereas the portrait is expected to show the essence of the subject. The term 'portrait painting' can also describe a painted portrait. Portrait painting has a long history as an artform.
One of best-known portraits in the Western world is Leonardo da Vinci's painting titled Mona Lisa, which is a painting of an unidentified woman. The worlds oldest known portrait was found in 2006 by a local pensioner, Gérard Jourdy, in the Vilhonneur grotto near Angoulême and is thought to be 27,000 years old.
When the artist creates a portrait of him- or herself, it is called a self-portrait. The first known in paint was by the French artist Jean Fouquet in c. 1450,[2] but if the definition is extended the first was by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten's sculptor Bak, who carved a representation of himself and his wife Taheri c. 1365 BC. However, it seems likely that self-portraits go back to the earliest representational art. 

Commercial- Madison Avenue

The term "Madison Avenue" is often used metonymously for advertising, and Madison Avenue became identified with the advertising industry after the explosive growth in this area in the 1920s.
Graphic design is the process of communicating visually using text and/or images to present information, or promote a message. Graphic design practice embraces a range of cognitive and aesthetic skills and crafts, including typography, image development and page layout. Graphic design is applied in communication design and fine art. Like other forms of communication, graphic design often refers to both the process (designing) by which the communication is created, and the products (designs) such as creative solutions, imagery and multimedia compositions. Graphic design was traditionally applied to static printed media, such as books, magazines and brochures. Since the advent of personal computers – and in particular WYSIWYG user interfaces – graphic design has been utilized in electronic media - often referred to as interactive design, or multimedia design.Graphic design is the process of communicating visually using text and/or images to present information, or promote a message. Graphic design practice embraces a range of cognitive and aesthetic skills and crafts, including typography, image development and page layout. Graphic design is applied in communication design and fine art. Like other forms of communication, graphic design often refers to both the process (designing) by which the communication is created, and the products (designs) such as creative solutions, imagery and multimedia compositions. Graphic design was traditionally applied to static printed media, such as books, magazines and brochures. Since the advent of personal computers – and in particular WYSIWYG user interfaces – graphic design has been utilized in electronic media - often referred to as interactive design, or multimedia design. (Above references from Wikipedia.com)