Painting Monet's Waterlilies - Emmy Award winning Landscapes Through Time with David Dunlop.

By the time he's painting water lilies like I'm trying to do today, we're talking about an 80 plus year old man suffering from cataracts and just a general sense of frustration with his own vision. But he's using that palette. He remembers it like a pianist remembers the keys on the piano. Here on the edge of Claude Monet's water lily pond, I've picked a bigger horizontal format. Now this would be like a miniature Monet water lily painting. This is a water lily painting from 1920. It's in the Museum of Modern Art today, and it's three panels. Each panel's about six and a half feet by 14 feet. These are big paintings. It's just the field of shimmering reflections of blues, pinks, and greens. The experience of being in a water lily pond, and that's just what he wanted to have. The way to begin this is the way Monet began. Loose sketching, he starts his sketches here, but he paints them in a studio over there now I did this loose drawing because when he was drawing That's how loosely he drew just to give himself a vague sense of idea now I'm going to rub in some color, his painting process takes a long time I'm only going to be doing this at one sitting with you He does one sitting, walks away, rests. Works for about an hour. But he needed the oil paints to dry, to keep building up the layers. I won't have that luxury, so I'm going to push that ahead by blurring in colors first. Let me show you the palette. Use Cobalt Blue. Remember, 1810, that's when this color comes in. And here it is in a lead tube. Cadmium Yellow, which was a new color. This is alizarin crimson which is like a carmine, and if I make a violet, a deep violet out of this, I can create a condition of simultaneous contrast. The yellow is stronger because the violet is next to it. They're opposite colors on the color wheel. The other issue is called successive contrast. If I take this dark color and I make a dark square out of it, now I'm going to do the same thing with yellow right beside it. That light looks brighter than that light. Because the contrast level is greater here than it is here. That's successive contrast. These were all principles that Chevreul put in his book. Principles of color harmony and contrast. 1839, principles that will change the course of painting. Chevreul discovers that we prefer relationships of color that are opposites. And so Monet, knowing this, paints with that simultaneous contrast principle. Let's get some more of those colors up, let's get that synthetic ultramarine blue, some brilliant rose, emerald green, and a copper-based azurite blue, hooker's green. Here goes some violet. So I'm going to look out to immerse myself in the experience. That's how you paint this kind of painting. I admired his inversion of ideas, so I could put the sky at the bottom and the trees at the top by reflection, something that would reflect the kind of ideas Monet used, turning the world upside down. The idea of the floating world is something that he inherits from Japan, the whole concept of the Edo period Japan and the woodblocks. I'll borrow some of that ultramarine blue. And then a little bit of that green. Watching him paint, people said, I only see a mess, I see chaos. It's just a slow development of something that shows the feeling, not a copying of a scene. That's the universe, life out of chaos. And thinking about a design in the loose way he thinks about a design, right now I have an advancing wedge. I'll offset that advancing wedge, I might want to put it this way or this way, but he's thinking about a design very covertly. It's very subtle, but it's there so the brain can read space. There's no horizon. And to the white, I forgot to put the white up. I can't make tints without white. These tubes really liberated painters, so we have pre-stretched canvases, portable easels. This made the advent of Impressionism and the portable landscape painters possible. You may not see this, I'm squinting like this at the canvas. Squint. Kind of a Clint Eastwood style squint. And the reason for that is it puts things out of focus. I don't want things in focus. I want to use a part of my brain that doesn't use my foveal vision. That's the part of the brain that reads words. I'm not trying to read words, I'm trying to get a sensation here. And that means I can't focus on anything, and the squinting helps do that. It also heightens values. Now the danger with the white paint is that if I mix more than a couple of colors in that white, it's subtractive mixing. Less light, less color, less luminance gets back to the eye. So the paintings look dingier and chalkier. In fact, that's a constant criticism of Impressionist painting is that they look chalky. Well, sometimes things are chalky, but the more colors you mix, the deader and the less light goes back to the eye. The color in the reflections aren't as intense as the colors that are throwing the reflections. That's because light's bouncing off of the trees and the irises into the water. You're getting a secondary effect. He's right on the edge of abstract expression. And in fact, the abstract expressionists will hold him as a hero 50, 60 years later. Make them a little deeper. Now that's a chalky color. But here I want a chalky color. If it's against a strong color, then the contrast of something chalky vibrates. The Impressionists painted with opaque colors. They weren't as interested in glazing, but putting colors side by side for effect. Let me go to another bigger brush. In fact, I'm going to scrub and pull out some lights and push some things around. I think I just heard a frog go for a swim. See the vertical and the lateral? That floats on top of the vertical. And it's this crosshatch pattern that gives you a sense of reflection. Claude Monet was a little controlling. He had an obsessive nature. He picked the colors for the house. He picked the recipes for dinner because he collected recipes. Now he lived with probably the most compassionate person he could hope to live with, Alice Hoschedé. We married after his first wife, Camille, dies. Now this pink offers, and if I add a little yellow to it, More of a simultaneous contrast against the blue-green. And now the picture starts to jump as a stronger vibration. His canvas can show through in certain areas. The threads and the texture of the canvas. In other areas, the paint is thick, just like the surface of this lily pond. Now I've gooped some paint on, and I'm going to push it back into the surface of the pond. These skylights that come through, and I'll do that by just dragging. You get the shimmer and the feeling of a little movement because the water isn't still. It has a subtle movement. I'm going to now float some things on the surface of this upside-down world. Remember, he didn't paint the world upside-down. He painted sensations that were visual. Now I'm trying to get it just right because values are what's important here. If my values are too light or too dark, I won't have something that sits on the surface. Big circles close, small circles farther away. That's perspective. Monet had an interesting piece of advice for all artists. The bigger the vocabulary of strokes, the more interesting the paintings. And it's the ambiguity of, is it on the surface? Is it underneath the surface? Which is what? Ambiguity heightens participation in the viewer. That's one of the things Impressionism discovers. You can project what you think you see through ambiguity. If it's out of focus. The mind will put it back in focus. In the early 1870s, France goes to war, the Franco-Prussian War. It's a disaster for France. While that's happening, Monet and Pissarro go to London where they seek out the paintings of Turner and Constable. They have some hardship there, but they discover the light and experiments of Turner. How he uses atmosphere and how he dissolves edges. And they discover, in the landscapes of Constable, greens they've never seen in paintings before. And it's that emerald green that becomes one of the keynote colors for the Impressionist palette. They come back inspired from those English landscape painters. If my values are too light or too dark, then I won't have something that sits on the surface. And as the lilies go from larger to smaller, your perception of space is that it's going from forward to back, in spite of the fact that the darks are in the back instead of in the front. And I'm thinking about colors that might not actually be there. They're just alluded to. If I see a little bit of something pinkish in a glow, I'll amplify the pink. Now, that's actually a neo-impressionist, a post-impressionist idea. Gauguin told Signac and others, the way to paint a color is to exaggerate the color. Where you see yellow, paint lots of yellow. But what Monet does is he's doing that subtly, putting up a little more of that color than is present. The pink is a complement to all this green, and I need complements, otherwise it's an analogous harmony, all blues and greens. The yellows, the corals, the reds, they're the opposite, so that's why he puts them in. I lifted up the lip of that lily, just to give you a greater sense of surface. We're hardwired to put things into symmetry, that's why I have this angling this way before it just offset the middle. Asymmetry creates an impression of more movement. And after all, they want to create a good impression. I'm creating a line that goes this way, this way, this way, to pull you back into that space. A meander, an ancient river in Turkey, that S, that serpentine shape. The Chinese use the shape of the serpent, the same shape. See in that puddle of blue-green how that pink just jumps, lurches. He agrees. Obscure and bleed, the softer the edges, the more volume. The tighter the edges, the less volume. This is just a peculiar phenomenon, what's called gradual transition. If you see something, a territory, that is transitioning very gradually, you think space, the sky, open water. If you see a territory that abruptly changes from gradual transition to an edge, you name it. We name. And we identify on the basis of abrupt transitions. And Monet's interested in gradual transitions with a smattering of abrupt transitions, which you will call lilies. That's more opaque paint, a little overlapping, so that they float on the surface. Put a little more light right up there. He could enrich his blues later, maybe enrich his pinks. But a beginning, remember, he paints for about an hour, then c'est tout, that's it, come back later. We should keep his method in mind. The beginnings are where the feeling lies, where the impression lies, and that's what Corot had told Monet. Trust your first impression. I'm David Dunlop. I'm a landscape painter.