Monet's Lily Pond

Impressionist art is based on the use of color, which has to "draw" the motive without resorting to line. At the beginning of his career, Monet used dark colours. From 1860 on, Monet abandonned dark colors and worked from a palette limited to pure light colors. In 1905, answering a question about his colors, he wrote :

"As for the colors I use, what's so interesting about that? I don't think one could paint better or more brightly with another palette. The most important thing is to know how to use the colors. Their choice is a matter of habit. In short, I use white lead, cadmium yellow, vermilion, madder, cobalt blue, chrome green. That's all."

And that is exactly what is so amazing about Monet's paintings. He lived a long life and painted hundreds of pictures and never swayed from using 6 colours and only 6 colours. 

He painted his water lily pond dozens of times and every painting is quite different from each other but he never swayed from his 6 colours. Amazing ... Now I know that with 6 primary colours an artist can combine them into hundreds if not thousands of other colours but when I go into an art supply store in Canada I see hundreds of tubes of different colours pre-mixed ... I suspect most students never learn how to blend colours together to create their own colours. Well they do but not to the extent that artists would have done a hundred years ago. Sometimes advances in technology make things worse rather than better!


I combined the pictures of the Lily pond from both trips  for this particular blog ... can you tell where one starts and the other stops?

Life is good ... enjoy

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