The Artist s Almanac May 2013 This thou perceives, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long. Sonnet 73, Shakespeare A gorgeous spring, it s been, this year, with ample rains, though mostly on weekends. Cool zephyrs delay need for much air conditioning. Any day now the brunt of summer s first day will fall upon us to remind us of just how hot and humid we will probably be next month. Why do we take all this for granted? What else can we do? Most of us work inside, and, even if we didn t, we can t bottle and store this sensory spring surplus surrounding us breezes, blossoms, birds, and the first cumulus cruising the azure sky above. The artist snatches at a bit of it for later, but only the best come close to capturing the diaphanous petals of a peony delicate as a bride s veil. Many have tried, yet only Monet s new approach gave its name to a method that swept the art world - the attempt to capture an impression of naked nature in the as we see it, by painting out of doors, before his subject, without the intermediation of the lens of a camera. Yet he claimed to be a gardener before he became an artist, and on an early trip to France we went to prove it so.
A photo of Monet s home and gardens in Giverney Normandy Tourist Board His cameras recorded only black and white, not color. He trumped the artist s traditional emphasis on drawing and form with the splendor of sunlit color and shade not dead, solid, or tonalist color, but spots of greyed color, each leaping from the canvas alongside the other, alive, just as the eye sees them. Thus is the viewer invited to participate by combining these spots in his mind s eye, allowing him to become part of the act of creation. Perhaps it was envy that caused some of his fellow artists to dismiss his work as unfinished, but a century-of wannabe Monets have followed, in an attempt to imitate his method and success. Here is one of my earliest efforts.
Happy Home Claudia feeding our infant son Dan, midday on a Sunday afternoon on our shaded patio, daylilies in full bloom. June 1970. Finished entirely in one sitting in plein air from side yard, by Bill Puryear. Perhaps the teams of gardeners who today swarm over the gardens along the Epte at Giverney have succeeded best, for the very gardens Monet loved and painted flourish today as they did a century ago. He had to fight for his right to be as daring in his gardening as he was in his art. The local commissioners tried to deny him the right to sluice off a bit of the Seine to construct his famous lily ponds. Iris is the state flower of Tennessee. Massed or individually they are proud beauties who stand regally for two weeks then turn to brown tatters, as do we all. Timing their capture before they flee is demonstrated in these two examples from Monet s garden photos versus his paintings.
Photo of Irises in bloom at Giverney Irises by Claude Monet The subject, for Monet, was secondary to the light, and if the sun went behind clouds, he packed up his easel and came back another day. He was fond of painting the same subject on different days in different lights and nothing better illustrates his method this than his famous series of haystacks. His subject is light, not stacked wheat. Wheatstacks (End of Summer) Claude Monet
Haystacks, Morning Snow Effect by Monet Grainstack (Sunset) by Monet
Wheatstack (Thaw, Sunset) - Monet After my visit to Giverney in 1985, I visited the Musée Marmottan Monet in an ancient residence on the west side of Paris. I was surprised at the lack of window bars or security here, a city where art theft, as dramatized in The Pink Panther, is raised to an art form and a way of life. Many were the treasures housed there, including Monet s Impression Sunrise. But the vigilant guards were firm on one point NO CAMERAS ALLOWED. Two weeks later the paining was stolen, not to be recovered (or ransomed?) until five years later, and I lost the opportunity to photograph this icon.
Monet Impression - Sunrise Monet explained the title later: Landscape is nothing but an impression, and an instantaneous one, hence this label that was given us, by the way because of me. I had sent a thing done in Le Havre, from my window, sun in the mist and a few masts of boats sticking up in the foreground.... They asked me for a title for the catalogue, it couldn't really be taken for a view of Le Havre, and I said: 'Put Impression.' (Cited by Forge, Andrew, and Gordon, Robert: Monet, page 58. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989, Wikipedia) Monet The Boat Studio Monet taught us a new way of looking at water and used it to incorporate the sky into every riverine painting. Here he uses the little boat he cleverly designed as to hold station with a pole in the middle of the small river, the Epte, which runs alongside his property at Govern. After Monet we can agree with the English writer Oscar Wilde that Life Imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.
Monet - Poplars - Epte
Bathers at La Grenouillère - Monet Claude Monet had no children of his own, only a step-daughter by his much-loved second wife and helper, Alice Hoschedé Yet he had his paintings, reproduced thousands of times, spreading beauty and his example worldwide. But his first love was his flowers and his gardens, and they thrive over a hundred years later in the valley of the Epte at Giverney. Few of us can maintain dozens of gardeners or paint like Monet, yet there are ways we can perpetuate spring as long as we or our children love beauty. Better than artificial or cut flowers on the green graves of our parents this Memorial day are the very rootstocks, tubers and bulbs which they left us they left us to divide with our children and our childrens children. The peony at the beginning of this Almanac grew from roots given to my mother by my wife s mother. My mother then divided them with my wife, under whose tender, loving care they have thrived and multiplied. Here she is inspecting her charges last week.
Claudia inspects her inheritance May 2013