Common themes of Servaes' paintings were landscapes, agricultural scenes, and subjects from the Bible. Servaes innovative work helped found Flemish Expressionism. He experimented with different ways to show his personal emotions through his paintings. His pioneering expressionist style used several techniques. The first was a blurring of perspective that was first found in Impressionism. Servaes combined this technique with a use of earth colors to create a gloomy tone in many of his works. An example of this is his 1912 landscape Field of Stubble. Servaes used rough brushstrokes, in simple areas of thickly applied dark earth colours, to create a synthetic image of a banal field of stubble at the edge of a wood. This direct and impulsive way of painting was a major impulse for Constant Permeke to evolve towards Expressionism.Albert Servaes, Field of Stubble, 1912 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent
