Tom's Life Bits

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 Arts & Entertainment Gibson's 'Apocalypto' a winner A writer learns her lines The N-word's nasty web Playlist Music video? Look to Web Old-time Most Popular Stories Last 24 hours Cartoon: Dec. 8, 2006: The Escape Clause: Fired Coaches Visit Santa Sheriff: Duo killed woman 2 people killed in N.C. plane crash Edwards aide seen as pit bull Meredith College sends dog on wild goose chase Last 7 days Cartoon: Dec. 8, 2006: The Escape Clause: Fired Coaches Visit Santa His sister in danger, 4-year- old plays hero Multimedia: Poplar Street time lapse State 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.