Lately I have been reading a book about Monet and looking carefully at his paintings.  I have never seen the water lilies in person, but last month I was lucky enough to see several of his paintings at the National Gallery in London.  I am, of course, enchanted with them. how did he do that?    He fiddled and muddled a great deal, painted sitting down, used too much white, painted with lots of little strokes, and worked on one painting over and over again for years— all habits that are currently out of fashion in the plein air art world.   In spite of this, he really is the one who defined and expanded plein air painting far beyond boundaries that are observed today.  Monet  found what is for me the holy grail of painting —the true sense of changeable light.  He really did not paint things; his subject was the light between the viewer and the things.

 He did this by following the best painting advice ever  — to simply paint what you see and make sure that what you see are not things surrounded by descriptive lines but paint-strokes of color.   I try to do this all the time, but keep getting mired  in the names of things and end up painting symbolically rather than relying on true and pure observation, a habit that often leads me to a bad painting.

Before I fell in love with oils,  I studied science illustration,  a discipline that taught me about drawing and true observation.  I created botanical illustrations in watercolor and filled many sketchbooks with nature drawings.  Finally, I decided I wanted my art to exist outside of a book, and I transferred almost entirely to oil painting. I started seriously painting about seven years ago when I traveled in Costa Rica with a set of oil paints. The paintings I did there were clumsy and inexperienced, but they gave me an interest in learning more.

Some of my favorite teachers taught me to start looking at subjects as if they are already depicted in paint.  I learned from both Jove Wang and Barry Raybould the importance of true observation and careful color mixing.  They also taught me the importance of having intent for a painting or Chi — a sense of strength and ‘first feeling.’  Monet visualized every painting from the outset — a practice that I am just beginning to sense might be useful.

As a young artist, I encounter an interesting challenge common to many of my painting companions’ wander-around-mode.  Even Monet, an artistic legend, talked in his letters of traveling around looking for painting sites and not finding any “motifs.”  He once said about a landscape he was reconnoitering,  “It had nothing to say to me.” According to him, there are places in the world that just do not have paintings waiting to happen.  This really is my biggest practical problem.  I get into wander-around-mode and travel all day, looking for paintings waiting to happen and not finding any.  I hate it, and have found ways to break the habit.   Painting with other people, and letting them decide where we should paint helps, as well as returning repeatedly to places and motifs I have painted before. 

I like Monet’s ability and preference for observing one subject again and again.  Even before he started his series paintings, he repeated subjects, such as the Houses of Parliament and the Thames River in London. Since he was truly looking at changes in the light rather than the objects depicted, old subjects were always new to him.   I am reassured that his solutions to  the subject search problems are similar to mine. He returned to places frequently, had a few favorite travel destinations and otherwise often looked no farther the a few hundred meters from his home for motifs.

Thinking about Monet has given me comfort and inspiration for painting.  Monet’s courage in following his whimsy to paint what appealed directly to him, whether it was a  subject in  vogue  or  otherwise, has  been an inspiration.  He found that working true to his own affinity for light and color led to the most successful paintings.  He often struggled with new subjects and themes in spite of doubting whether they would ever translate well into painting.  

He once showed his resistance to the market pressure on him by saying,  “There is no point in my being a man of the sunlight…. one mustn’t specialize in a single theme.”  I hope and try to be equally true in my paintings.

Quotes taken from: House, J. (1986) Monet: Nature into Art. Yale University Press, New Haven and London.

 Ann McMillan resides in the San Francisco Bay area.  She recently returned from painting trips in southern England and from the San Luis Obispo Plein Air Painting  Festival. Her work can be seen on her Website at www.amgallery.net, or on the Websites of her galleries: the William Lester Gallery in Point Reyes Station — www.williamlestergallery.com and Eriksen Gallery in Half Moon Bay — www.eriksengallery.com.