Tom's Life Bits

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===== Monet Impressionist painting =====

A writer learns her lines
An afternoon at the easel gives some
insights into the challenges Monet met

'I look at my own painting and see only what I would fix or do
differently,' Ellen Sung says about her Giverny-inspired work.

Different strokes

Compare what arts writer Ellen Sung and professional artist
Dianne T. Rodwell painted from the same photograph and you'll
see these (and other) striking differences:

* Rodwell's more diagonal brush strokes lend a sense of movement
that's almost like wind rustling.

* Rodwell applied more paint to the canvas.

* Rodwell uses more green tones to suggest shadows and create
contrast. Sung's greens are less modulated.

* Rodwell's bushes are more faithful to the photo. On the other
hand, Sung's path is more literal.

* Sung painted a circular swipe that suggests an arch over the
path. She insists that it's a mistake, which accounts for its
absence in Rodwell's piece.

If you're planning to see the Monets while they're in Raleigh,
the N.C. Museum of Art strongly suggests buying timed tickets
before you go. The easiest way is online at www.ncartmuseum.org.

The museum, at 2110 Blue Ridge Road, is open from 9 a.m. to 5
p.m. Tuesday-Saturday (until 9 p.m. Friday) and 10 a.m. to 5
p.m. Sunday. Monet tickets are $15. Call 839-6262 for details.

More than 112,000 people have seen the exhibit, which runs
through Jan. 14. Related Content See reader submissions to the
"My Monet" gallery Share photos of your Monet-inspired art. N.C.
Museum of Art: Monet in Normandy Learn more about Monet and
interact with his artwork. How to channel your inner Monet More
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offsides with BC Kenan plans get OK Ad Links Buy a link » Ellen
Sung, Staff Writer In the spring, The News & Observer sent me to
France, a once-in-a-lifetime journey retracing Claude Monet's
career in Normandy. On a fall afternoon, I began the second leg
in a studio at Artspace, where a Raleigh artist helped me trace
the way Monet painted.

After months of studying his life and his art, then spending
time with the works that hang in the N.C. Museum of Art's "Monet
in Normandy" exhibition, I was struck by the amazing quality of
such images as the Rouen cathedral from 1891 and "Wisteria,"
created two decades later at his cottage in Giverny.

From across the room, the paintings make sense. Up close they
dissolve into abstraction. I wanted to know -- or at least start
to understand: How did he strike that tantalizing balance?

When he dashed all those wet oil paints together, I wondered,
why did it look vibrant, not muddy? Why is the result
recognizable, not a jumbled mess? Why, basically, is it a Monet
-- and not an Ellen Sung?

I last used a paint brush in middle school. I know about
painting from lectures, books and interviews -- which is like
the difference between knowing all about an Aston Martin and
being able to build one.

It was absurd to think I could even begin to absorb Monet's
magic in an afternoon. But the experience brought unexpected
revelations.

First, you prepare

Dianne T. Rodwell creates and displays her impressionistic
canvases, encaustic works and handmade lamps at Artspace, the
downtown Raleigh studio-gallery complex. She adores Monet and
has made three trips to Giverny to paint at his restored home
and gardens.

On this afternoon, we would paint the scene from a photo Dianne
took on her first pilgrimage, in 1998. It showed a garden path,
lined by flowers and foliage, with a stand of trees against a
cloud-dotted sky that looks like Monet invented it.

Monet's work looks so breezily evoked that I assumed we'd prop
up the canvas, squeeze some paint onto a palette and go. Instead
we spent five minutes digging through Dianne's many toolboxes
looking for an Allen wrench to tighten the supports on one
easel.

As we searched, Dianne explained that she had taken this fancy
collapsible metal easel to France to paint "en plein air," or
directly from nature. It even had a shoulder strap and a paint
box inside. But it wound up taking so long to set up, she said,
that she was tired before she even started painting.

I felt for her -- and for Monet. His easel was easier to set up,
but he had to haul it, along with canvases and his paint box, up
cliffs and across wide, rocky beaches. In Normandy, I wondered
how he kept his paintings from flying away in the vicious wind.
Now I wondered how he even stood his easel upright. And the
effort was all to capture 30 minutes of an effect of light that
might not even reappear that day.

We never found the right wrench, so Dianne used a utility clip.
After covering our hands with a thick white paste called
ArtGuard to protect them from the paint, we started working on
our palettes.

To create the best hues

I had seen Bob Ross on television and assumed we'd use wooden
palettes with thumbholes. That's what Monet used. You can see
his massive, chipped palette -- still covered with paint -- at
the Musee Marmottan in Paris.

Instead we used palette paper, kind of like waxed paper in an
open case. It wasn't romantic, but it was more convenient than
cleaning the wooden version.

For paint, we used alkyds, or quick-drying oils. Monet painted
in oil, using the then-novel invention of paint from a tube.
Before then, artists had to grind their own pigments and mix
them with linseed oil or another base.

Dianne insisted that we mix our own colors, as the
impressionists did. We started with just a few primary colors
plus white.

My palette looked like a Roy Lichtenstein cartoon, not a Claude
Monet landscape. I needed a ton of green, so I grabbed yellow
and blue and wound up with a John Deere shade. Dianne suggested
adding a little red -- the complementary color -- which mellowed
the jangling green. We mixed colors for the sky, the path and
the flowers on the bush.

Color is central to impressionist painting and its enduring
appeal. When you ask people why they like Monet, they most often
say, "I don't know ... I just like the colors." A snob might
respond that these people like colors that match their
furniture, but Monet's colors are usually inherently pleasing:
brilliant but never brassy.

At this point, nearly ready to paint, I looked at my palette and
Dianne's. Already, I could see her years of experience. My
palette had the green and a few other colors that weren't bad --
and a whole lot of colors you associate with plastic Easter
eggs. Hers were softer, but still rich.

We grabbed fat brushes and, like Monet, used blue to sketch in
some shapes.

What is and isn't there

Dianne's photograph was well-composed. If you've ever picked up
a camera, you know what I mean. There are pictures taken "of"
things (me in front of a statue!) and pictures that invite you
into the scene.

Monet had an incredible eye for the latter, but even his
paintings "of" things, such as the Rouen cathedral, are dynamic.
Born before photography became widespread, he composed from
nature, without the help of a camera's view finder. And after
visiting Normandy, I can vouch that he didn't take artistic
license and, say, move a cliff to the left for composition's
sake. Art history is filled with painters who did.

Copying a photograph is surely less challenging than what Monet
did but not as easy as I had imagined. Dianne taught me to hold
the brush lightly and let it dance across the canvas. I stopped
looking at the photograph and made jiggly shapes for the path,
bushes and especially the trees. Dianne said my tree line would
be more interesting if my strokes moved up and down like a
jigsaw puzzle, so I tried that too.

I filled in colors -- using my blue for the sky and green for
the bushes -- and it looked like paint-by-numbers. Then Dianne
showed me how to scatter the same colors throughout the painting
to unify it. She helped me "zig-zag" my highlight colors across
the canvas to create movement. She coached me on leaving "air" -
- white canvas showing through -- and brushing with evenly sized
strokes.

After about an hour, I had made progress. But the painting was
missing something. The left side looked OK, but the sky was too
harsh, the right side too flat, and the path, instead of
receding into the distance, looked like a hill of Silly Putty.

Painting is a lot scarier than writing. Words are easy to edit,
but it takes diligent scraping to erase paint. I knew my canvas
needed more paint -- but I also knew that one bad stroke could
ruin it.

Dianne told me to step back, take off my glasses and think about
it from a distance. And I realized I needed contrast, something
to pop against the green. I added a thick dollop of pink on the
right, and suddenly that side looked balanced. I filled in the
sky a little better. It was still too harsh, but that was my
amateur color- blending.

Finally there was the path to deal with. Dianne and I stared at
the path, trying to figure out how to give it depth.

"Look at the picture," she said. "The light falls from left to
right."

Sure enough, I hadn't even thought about the shadows. My mind
had thought "path" and interpreted it as "triangle shape."
Rodwell advised me as I added two dark blue strokes, left to
right, that suddenly made the path interesting and suggested
texture.

Empathy from an easel

As I painted, I thought about Monet and the agonized letters he
wrote from painting trips. "I know myself that they are no
good," he wrote once of his paintings. In Norway, he lamented
seeing "so many beautiful things that are impossible to do." And
later: "What a curse this damned painting is!"

From my lesson, I certainly learned about technique. I think I
learned more, though, about the particular terror of the painter
-- that at any moment, he or she may have done not enough, or
gone one step too far.

Monet never stopped fretting, even when the painting was done.
He scratched over one picture after more than 20 sittings,
kicked a hole in the famous "Lady with a Parasol" (it was
repaired), and destroyed about 200 canvases.

"Once I am dead, no one will destroy any of my paintings, no
matter how poor they may be," his friend Lilla Cabot Perry
recalled him saying.

I look at my own painting and see only what I would fix or do
differently. But for now, I think I'll keep it. It matches my
sofa.

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