Claude Monet

Oscar-Claude Monet (November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plain-air landscape painting. Masterful as a colourist and as a painter of light and atmosphere, his later work often achieved a remarkable degree of abstraction, and this has recommended him to subsequent generations of abstract painters.

Inspired in part by Edouard Manet, Monet departed from the clear depiction of forms and linear perspective, which were prescribed by the established art of the time, and experimented with loose handling, bold colour, and strikingly unconventional compositions. The emphasis in his pictures shifted from representing figures to depicting different qualities of light and atmosphere in each scene.

Monet has long been one of my favourite artists because of his use of colour and his application of the paint in his paintings. In 2016 I was lucky enough to view Pink water lilies (1897-1899) in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome. The painting’s pastel pallet and soft brush strokes combined with Monet’s subtle changes of colour create an outstanding piece of artwork. It is of no surprise to me that the paintings in Monet’s Water Lillie series are classes as masterpieces. His work is much more expressionistic than my own as in my current work I am favouring a more stripped back clinical drawing style. Looking at Monet’s work has influenced my decision to look more closely at the flower itself and to create more detailed drawings focusing on the object instead of the medium in which I am presenting it.