“Paint as you see nature yourself. If you don’t see nature right with an individual feeling, you will never be a painter, and all the teaching cannot make you one [emphasis added].”

Often I will hear someone say, after looking at a painting of mine, “I love your palette.” The underlying assumption is that were someone else were to use my palette, the colors in their paintings would be about the same. Not true. The colors that one sees in a painting are the colors that that painter sees or makes up.

This process at its best, therefore, is joyful given the sense of fulfillment one feels as one realizes one’s powers and unique shape – and yet it is always fraught with degrees of torment given that it is a kind of rebirth, where one keeps shedding skins, keeps growing. So we find, for example, Monet’s most important teacher, Eugene Boudin, explaining his love of painting skies this way: “To swim in the open sky…what a joy.” And then he adds, “…and what a torment.” To understand what Monet is doing we must probe further this linkage between exhilaration, triumph, and joy on the one hand and torment on the other.

One might think that to be non-literal one might do a fair amount of imagining or working out of one’s head, as opposed to a steady looking or engagement with the subject. In other words, if one’s work is very non-literal, almost to the point of abstraction, would one be painting more in the mode of – say – Picasso or the Abstract Expressionists? Certainly, that’s a possibility, but with the Impressionists and particularly with Monet, I would argue that something else entirely is going on.

The key in understanding what Monet is doing turns on what one means by “literal:” when Monet looks at water lilies (according to Monet) he is not seeing water lilies. This is what non-literal means in the context of Impressionism: don’t see the thing (with a name, the literal) you are looking at. Instead see only visual elements: line, tone, and color.

I emphasize the phrase “the authentic method” because there are dozens of people who claim to do or teach and write books on Impressionism and after decades of study I simply have to throw down the gauntlet and say, I’m sorry but THIS IS the method……The method, it needs to be pointed out, is more involved than “the mechanics” or the “how-to” steps. It’s really a point of view about art and painting, a philosophy.

the measure of a painting – like traveling, perhaps, or friendships, love relationships, love-making itself, dancing, conversation, watching a movie, and so many other activities that are life-giving, is the feeling or set of feelings that we have during the actual activity itself. Robert Henri once encouraged painters to pretend that they were dancing a painting. This is my point exactly, but my not so imaginative wrinkle on this is to encourage painters to pretend that they are singing a painting.

Kim’s is messy just right: it seems to be the by-product of a visual exploration, one that suggests that she isn’t looking for results so much as she works, but rather is immersed in a sensual rush that perculates as she converses with what she sees. She not only seems to be exploring but finding, finding bits and pieces, splats and scratches that lie beyond the facts. This, to me, is the mark of a serious artist. The subject is not the figure in the end. The figure was just the prompt, the point of departure. The subject is always Kim.

Picasso believed the same could be said for painting: “To be finished means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow, the most unfortunate one for the painter as well as for the painting.”

Feeling “larger” during and because of the creative process is the name of the game. The painting just happens along the way.