I found myself walking around the Musee d’Orsay during the daytime. I went upstairs, and under the skylights, I saw Monet’s paintings, glistening, just beautiful beyond belief and vibrating. Up until this point, I was never really a fan of Monet. Now, I am.
We were there as an art class, walking around the museums when there were about 40 of us and everyone was on break. When they finished the dinner break, I said, “Come on, we have to go to the Musee d’Orsay and you have to see the Monets upstairs.” When I took the class, it was now 7 o’clock in the winter time, so there was no longer skylight coming through and the temperature of outdoor lights coming through. Now we were looking at the Monets under fluorescent lighting.
I kept thinking, if the world could only see these Monets, they would follow what he knew, and what he did, and how he said, “Paint the color and not the object.”
What he was really talking about was each color change temperature and when you understand the temperature changes then you are able to see so much more. When you’re looking at a shadow and you can’t tell what color it is, if you know the color theory, oddly enough, you start to see that color. It’s as if the more I know, the more I see.
If only the world could see Monet under the same lighting. But that also goes for any old master. If you paint it in a dark room, have you ever seen a show where there are three floodlights on everything? We recently saw a Sorolla show that was so overly lit, it was almost offensive. We had to take our iPhone and underexpose each painting just to appreciate what Sorolla’s painting at dusk looked like.