Unlearning with Monet

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.