artists as gardeners, do u use plants to 'paint' like Monet?

If only I could! My garden is a bit monochromatic this summer--many shades of yellow. My rose, the schwartzer Madonna, is a deep red. Quite nice, too...

Actually - at least from the time, both gardens were completed, onwards - Monet placed each plant and flower in such a way that it could eventually be used in his work. :wink:

Since I only plant my roof garden with flowers, I arrange them - more or less and changing every year - by colour, largeness, ... and sometimes I photograph them :wink:

Llike Monet? No, more like Pollack.
Just kidding. I live in the U.S. southwest desert where we are now experiencing a drought of more than 70 days. Thus, everything here is gravel with rocks (with disperse desert plants: including the largest nopal cactus I've ever seen and a large Bird of Paradise. My front yard has pinkish gravel with three large white boulders arranged in the spirit of the famous rock garden at the Ryoanji Rinazi zen temple in Kyoto, Japan.
Back to the West, I guess I arrange my "garden" more like the minimalist, Ben Nicholson.

Well, I don't have a garden - I live in NYC, on a small alcove studio apartment but I do have a bonsai, a bamboo and two other small plants on the inside of my window. I love to sit and paint next to them, sometimes I even get color ideas from them.

yes Walter he did plant to paint and created the pools and bridges, adding the rowing boats, for the same reason.

Have you been to Giverny? I loved it and the American museum nearby, with work by American artists of the era who worked in France, was really interesting with some lovely work. Walking through the gardens was just like walking through a Monet painting, particularly the pools and reeds and waterlilies and willows. The huge paintings at the Orangerie and the Marmattan museums captured the atmosphere and light so well.

jln you obviously put the same thought into your garden as your paintings and it sounds interesting. spare and restrained done well is just as interesting as lush and voluptuous like Giverny.

I'm almost every year there (next time will be in August, but I've been already there three weeks ago :wink: ).

I don't like the American museum that much. (That's just a very personal iew of the exhibition there - some paintings are really nice.)


[Link to Marmottan museum]

Mrs. SealPoet does, and does professionally.

Me, I'm just the shovel...

I painted a preying mantis on a shrub once. I dont do flowers well. Im more apt to let the flower die and paint its remains, more of an interpretive thanatology(?) Flowers are too fragile and transient for me, and they cant move. MAybe, a fleeting beam of light on a field of flowers , (if I could come up with a composition)

JL's really hot sun though a chair back and a red sky sez more to me than Monets garden paintings. I know, its heresy, but I find Monets garden and lily pad paintings kind of boring. I dont think he was breaking any new trail in those paintings

I create my garden in containers and do try and 'paint' with the placement of colors and pot shapes.

I, too, find Monet's paintings a bit boring. They are clearly SUCCESSFUL, doing what Monet intended. But I guess my eye is not subtle enough to appreciate his work. I need more of a sense of design. He DID design the gardens he used as his models, but I just miss the aesthetic point, I guess. I enjoyed more the landscapes of Osso because her designs (i.e., compositions) are more obvious. Closer to the achievements of design and abstract art. In other words, for me, form is as important, if not more so, as content.

The water lilies, as most of Monet's later works, are more "dreamlike", while his earlier works surely show a lot of design (and information!).

Well, at least that's what think .... and see :wink: .

(Btw: in 1912, Monet was diagnosed with a cataract in his right eye. Eventually, cataracts affected both eyes: thus, he really had to paint from memory - results, similar to my memories that I take away when visiting Giverny gardens :wink: )

walter - thanks for those great links - I've saved them for future reference.

famer - i wasn't talking about painting flowers but painting with flowers in the way you plant them - to create sweeps of colour and move the eye around the garden in the same way as you do in a painting.

Not like Monet!!!!! I love the huge paintings in the Marmottan and Orangerie and not doing anything new????????? nothing like his work had ever been produced, paintings were planned, highly detailed, almost photographic at times and usually academic in subject matter, painting as he did and the subjects he did was revolutionary - only Turner had really painted light in that way before, with objects dissolving in light.

Vivien, comparing Monet to Turner "with objects dissolving in light" is a very powerful kudo for Monet.

think of the series of cathedrals though as the light changes and the lilies and the stations with the steam from the trains. That man had a feeling for light. I think they lose an awful lot in reproduction - the sheer painterliness of them is reduced and they appear tighter and more graphic - and generations of using them for chocolate boxes and biscuit tins hasn't done him any favours!

But the Turner Foundation!


(However, I agree :wink: )

vivien, you misread my post. I stated that I dont like Monets garden and water lilies and bridge paintings that he did toward the end of his life. The early things were certainly breakthrough for his time and he did have a sense of light and "the fleeting moment". When he was old and almost blind , his work became derivative and kinda , just, well, boring.
I wish that he would have just quit painting in the early 20th century . like about 1906 when he did the PArliament Building in various lights , and did "The Garden Path"

I am convinced, Vivien. And I should note that I've only seen his work in reproduction. There's an artist in my town whose work I respond to deeply, but the reproductions of those works do nothing for me. This is another reason to love OBJECTS of art--not just their representations, in reproductions or the commentaries on them by critics. Their true value can probably only be fully appreciated while in their presence. I remember as a young child thinking that the objects on the altar of a Catholic church, or even more so in the inner sanctum of a Greek orthodox church, were mysteriously special, EXTRAordinary and even sacred. Today, that's how I see successful paintings and sculptures. And that's why I instinctively rejected the viewpoint a few decades ago against objects of art in favor of ideas (i.e., conceptual art). Isn't it wonderful that we as artists can, in principle, create "sacred" objects?
Apologies for the digression.

farmer - sorry i misunderstood. I do like the late works at the Marmottan and Orangerie

- some of the stuff he did before his cataracts were operated on horrified him when he saw them after the op. Cataracts distort your colour vision and they did get very bright and strangely coloured during that time.

jln - the Marmottan/Orangerie paintings are just huge (about 20ft long at a guess and 8ft high) and there are a series of them arranged around very large oval rooms - the effect is overwhelming and beautiful. I'm sure you would like them. someone will probably correct me on the measurements but I'm too tired to google and check

Digressions are fine - it was interesting to hear opinions

some things - Picasso for instance don't lose anything in reproduction but others change and appear tighter and less painterly, mind you as you love Picasso you may disagree on this and feel they do lose out on reproduction. I was actually disappointed in the paint quality of the Picasso's i first saw, after only seeing reproductions prior to that.

i guess it was in 1907 or 8 when Monet had a show at Ruen Durels and he slashed about 20 of his works because he felt they were hack work.
Ive seen the Orangerie , the one that I like least is called 2 willows and is about6ft X 55 ft long. mOMA has one about 42 ft long and is similarly not my cuppa.

Not all my favorite artists (and Monet IS one of my favorites ) can hit homerune all the time.