Category Archives: Color & Technique

Unlearning with Monet

Copy of Monet’s The Beach at Sainte-Adresse (2024)
The last time I was doing any kind of representative painting I was focused on heavy realism. That was around twenty years ago (!) and it has been interesting to see how strong the tendency still is to want to wring detail out of the new stuff. I had always pushed toward photorealism with the still life compositions and felt like the surrealistic paintings also hit harder when they looked more like a photo, but this time around with straight-up landscapes, I’m feeling like high realism makes for a less interesting painting. Scrapping detail, however, is sometimes easier said than done.

So to loosen things up I switched to acrylic paint and started going a lot faster. I also went back and did a crash study on Claude Monet and other early impressionists and painted a few copies in early 2024. Unsurprisingly the Monets that helped the most in preparing for the coastal theme were some of the Saint-Adresse paintings done in and around 1867. It’s always interesting with impressionists to note what gets left out because it’s a window into what the painter sees and how they prioritize visual elements. Of course lighting drives a lot of those decisions, but the organization of color is often where the creativity lives in impressionism. To me this is the greatest value of Monet - abstracting color without tipping completely over into unnatural palettes.

Part of my unlearning has been to literally unfocus my eyes, not just to identify the light blocks, but to break down the color as well. “Paint what you see” is about 90 percent of the representative painting advice I can give, and a way to apply that advice to myself in this case is to hinder the view. I don’t know how well the tactics are working so far though - old habits die hard and I think I’m mostly painting realism with an impressionist edge. I have enjoyed revisiting Monet though and I’ve always learned something whenever I’ve copied the work of the greats.

Categories: Color & Technique

Where Olive Meets Periwinkle

Waders on a Sandbar (2026)
The unlimited ways that bodies of water can appear has been an attraction for me with these coastal paintings. Previously I had not spent a lot of time reducing something like a view of the ocean to its basic form, so this has been a good personal exercise in detaching context from a familiar environment and simply seeing the light, hues, and shapes as they are. In doing that I’ve finally started recognizing the really interesting and unexpected color combinations that appear when water, sunlight, reflection, shadow, and subsurface elements collide.

There is a particular cast to Gulf water west of Mobile Bay. It’s not altogether unique, but familiar in the northwestern Gulf Coast and different from the celebrated pthalo of the panhandle. Watching my kids out on a submerged sandbar on a sunny day, I started looking at the shallow span in between that was free of breakers but full of motion. Two absolutely distinct colors were on display - the bright periwinkle of the reflected surface and olive wavelets revealing the mixed hues of the water and sand. Seeing such different colors alternating side by side is interesting. The combination clashes happily in bright sunlight and does a lot to give the impression of movement when you paint it.

The paint color for the olive will vary depending on water depth, time of day, and what beach you’re standing on. I’ve gotten a pretty serviceable Mississippi Sound olive with a base of burnt umber, yellow ochre, and Prussian blue, maybe a cadmium yellow boost if it’s sunny. For a convincing periwinkle I’ve been mostly happy mixing a sky blue from Prussian blue and white, then adding alizarin crimson to taste and then black or raw umber to muddy it up. I was finding that starting with pink pushes the mix too much toward purple and away from how the natural color looks. I don’t know why it should matter but for some reason starting out with the light blue helps me avoid that.

Olive and periwinkle. You won’t see this combination too much between Pensacola and Apalachicola, and you probably wouldn’t pick it for your living room, but it conveys a distinct Gulf Coast vibe all the same.

Categories: Color & Technique