Education and Inspiration

CLAUDE MONET, PERHAPS THE best known of the Impressionists, is the only one of that group who stayed the course and and followed Impressionism through its natural evolution.

All the other Impressionists — Renoir, Sisley, Pissaro, Manet — eventually became disenchanted with Impressionism's failings, and all sought alternative ways to reclaim the solid form that the style typically sacrificed. Monet, however, stayed true to his vision. His well known Water Lilies, painted at Giverny, are testaments to how the building blocks of art — form, color, space, paint — can take on greater importance that the subject itself, a purely modern aesthetic. Some of the late works from Giverny could easily pass as works of abstract expressionism.

My own work parallels Monet in this way. A high regard and interest in the abstract qualities of light and pigment, yet not a complete willingness to abandon a connection to reality and a recognizeable subject.

CORRUGATION. Technically, Monet's ability to manipulate pigment is unsurpassed in 20th century art. A detail of the layered brushwork common in his later works reveals a technique called (by Robert Herbert) "corrugation." The technique maintains a separation between the texture of the paint and the color we actually see. Robert Herbert explains:

"First, he chose canvas with the weft threads thicker, more pronounced than the warp. By brshing quickly at right angles to the protruding threads, he covered onnly those threads with pigment, leaving the valleys between then relatively untouched. After the first such coating had dried, he repaeated the process several times. Each succeeding coating was more effective, because the thickening of the ribs caught the paiant more easily. The last layer or two were applied when the existing pigment was not quite dry, and this pushed the edges of the ridges out over the valleys — an effctive way of denying them too rigid an appearance while adding to the textural vibration."

View more of Monet's work online at artcyclopedia.com