art
Monet the painting of light
and its role in picture painting
WXVSOIWSJXLIFVYWLLI[SYPH½\XLIWYRVE]EWMXVIETTIEVIHSVE[MRH
swept passing cloud.... He would look upon falseness, and with what is
convenient, with contempt. Monet was quick to execute piercing brush
strokes onto canvass...I saw him capture a spot of light on a white rock
ERHTMRMXXSMXMR]IPPS[7XVERKIP]XLIWXVSOIWGSRZI]IHXLI¾IIXMRKIJJIGX
of an ungraspable sun beam. Another time with cupped hands he took
rain water up as it hit the sea and threw it quickly at the canvass he was
working on. And indeed it was rain he was wanting to paint as it veiled
the sight of the waves in the sea, rocks and the sky too which could hardly
be discerned during that rainstorm.”
Monet used painted shapes as a pictorial vehicle by which to translate
the interest he nourished for the radiation of light: natural light. In fact
Monet painted outdoors in the open. The reply he proffered to Emile
Taboureux a journalist who asked if he could visit his studio is self explan-
wholeness through the projected harmony of its iridescence spread onto
painted canvass”.
Guy de Maupassant contributed with the following words: “In the
course of this last year I have been following Claude Monet in his quest
for ‘impressions’ to paint. He wasn’t a painter as such, he was a hunter.
He would go about with a team of young carriers – children - clutching
even half a dozen works revealing the same subject scene in different
moments of the day and with diverse shades and light, according to the
position of the sun. He would take them up again to modify this or that
detail of the sky as it changed. He would at times pause for the sun to
reappear from behind a cloud and cast a deeper shadow while with few