There is only one profession where the word “starving” is accepted as an appropriate adjective – ie, starving artist. To be honest, I think this is due to the fact that artists embrace and celebrate the market and the private economy instead of resisting it – instead of thinking creatively beyond the canvas. I don’t think it takes a whole lot of insight to figure out that the point of the art industry is not to expand the circle of art and creativity, but to insure that “art” is the province of a few very wealthy people …

Painters today, unknowingly – or perhaps I should say unreflectively – embrace practices that control the very creative processes that could give them life………The artist is someone who seeks freedom from the control that market-driven entrepreneurs, market-driven investors, all those people who control exhibitions-exposure-competitions, and all those people who grab you by the short hairs require.

“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.