That would be expressionism you have in mind, or perhaps surrealism aka Dali. Impressionism is about one's "first" or "direct" impression of things as you look

That would be expressionism you have in mind, or perhaps surrealism aka Dali. Impressionism is about one's "first" or "direct" impression of things as you look at them, not about how you imagine/idealize them later on. Impressionists took this "first impression" business pretty seriously. Your painting most likely would not be called impressionistic if you painted it your studio, from a photograph, or from memory -- you had to do it en plein air (out in the open, from real life). The idea prevailing at the time (which partly came from the physiology of vision actually) was that, on one's first impression of something, the brain only perceives patches of color (a 2D image), that are only processed after a split second into something more resembling a 3D representation. Impressionists tried to capture that supposedly "pure" first image. Everyone tried to do it in his/her own way. Seurat, for example developed pointillism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seurat-La_Parade_detail.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seurat-La_Parade_detail.jp...).