No artist captures the colors of my childhood dreams better than Henri Rousseau

Cool post . I wholeheartedly agree about his works. As a child I was mesmerized. I wanted to climb into the paintings and explore the jungle .

Are you high, OP?

R1 There's just something about them. I almost can't put my finger on it because it's hard to explain from a technical point of view. But they jog this intensely primal and personally, " ancient" experience for me, like his works are tied somehow to some of my earliest memories or a FEELING from my earliest memories. That's the best way to describe it.

...on life, R2!

I loved the illustrations in Where The Wild Things Are and how they took up more of each page the further you read

Raoul Dufy and Brian Wildsmith capture the colours of my childhood.

Better link for R3

I agree with you, OP. I was at the Art Institute of Chicago recently and there’s a wonderful Rousseau (The Waterfall) on display - it captivated me. Even more so when I learned that he was self-taught and never actually visited any of the exotic, dreamlike worlds he depicts.

R5 Is it something about the intensity of the colors that jogs almost synthete like sensory memory connections? Does it remind you of a childhood environment or story? The freshness of your senses not yet dulled by age and time?

The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren (the Pippi Longstocking author) had a profound impact on me as a young boy and I was obsessed with that world thanks to the illustrations, they were frightening and mesmerising at the same time

R7 There's almost no other way to describe it than a visual representation of a feeling, a memory of childhood dreams.

I took my nephew to see a Hilma af Klint exhibit a few years ago and he was truly transfixed by her paintings, it was cool to see in such a young child

An overlooked abstract artist, her work pre-dates Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian

R11 As adults, it can be hard to remember a time looking at art before we "knew" everything we know about the world, seeing it with a totally fresh eyes and perspective.

Some art needs a mature eye for it to not be traumatic, so obviously not all shows are for kids but that's an all ages appropriate show. You sound like a great uncle!

r8 The latter two situations, when I was naive and ignorant enough to see the world as bright, wondrous and curious; and the Brian Wildsmith illustrated [italic]Child's Garden of Verses[/italic] made the strange and archaic look fabulous and psychedelic.

OP, did you read "Where the Wild Things Are" when you were little? Maybe that's where the seed got planted.

R15 You would think so but I actually didn't get that book until I was about seven years old. This feels almost like a sensation I get from early American landscape work (like a Thomas Cole painting) but more exaggerated, this slightly melodramatic feeling of these intense skies and a sense of unending, primeval wilderness in a way that seems to fit a very distant memory of place, from when I was perhaps a baby or toddler. A very early perspective.

Chagall

Rousseau's work was reviled by critics most of his life. Classic starving artist. It's the intensity and depth of color and pattern contrasted to it's flatness- no real depth of field, like R16's example. More akin to japanese prints than classic western art

We're trained to think the more we learn and the older we get, the more we know about the nature of the material world.

But like how some describe children as being aware of "angels" or as having some kind of extra sense, what if these earliest memories are not distorted perception but the truest, most accurate and in fact, our view is warped by experience and developing a different kind of processing? What if this world is most accurate when we see it as a baby or very young child?

R18 That's what fascinates me the most about his work. I see how the trends and power players of the art world at the time could rip everything about it apart and yet, that's irrelevant to me. It just doesn't matter when I look because I see truth in his work. I see an artist's perception, a gift in it that can't be faked.

That's the weird thing about art: Many can train to be technical greats and create technically "perfect" work. Few can create masterpieces where everything keeps coming together in this weird, creative kismet that can't be explained and has some inherent value that can't be created, just expressed. The most powerful artists just...are that way. Like they were born with some different wiring that helps them see the world from a sort of "outside" looking in perspective.

R20 I often wonder if artists have a slightly differently developed Truine/ "Reptialian" part of the brain, which is tied to ancient instincts and high sensory perception.

It's also considered the most basic, low operating part, so I'm not claiming artists have brains that process things in a way that exceeds the processing of other people by virtue of being an artist, just that natural born artists might have some kind of differently developed Triune brain region that allows them to process surroundings in a more primitively visceral way that mimics how ancient humans saw the world.

For me, it's Pablo Picasso

Van Gogh for me. Also, for some reason, Rembrandt's self-portraits.

N.C. Wyeth - My grandparents had a set of children's classic novels illustrated by Wyeth. When I was shown his illustrations decades later I recognized the style, which I still love. The one below is actually new to me. I couldn't find the one I was looking for.