Painting Monet's Waterlilies - Emmy Award winning Landscapes Through Time with David Dunlop.

[Music] by the time he's painting water lies like I'm trying to do today we're talking about an 80 plus year old man suffering from cataracts and just a general sense of frustration with his own Vision but he's using that palet he remembers it like a Pianist remembers the keys on the piano here on the edge of Claud Monet's water Lily Pond I've picked a bigger horizontal format now this would be like a miniature Monae water lily painting this is a Waterlily painting from 1920 it's in the Museum of Modern Art today and it's three panels each panel is about 6 1/2 ft by 14 ft these are Big paintings it's just the field of shimmering reflections of Blues pinks and greens the experience of being in a water lily Pond and that's just what he wanted to have the way to begin this is the way Monae began loose sketching and he starts his sketches here but he paints them in a studio over there now I did this loose drawing because when he was drawing that's how Loosely he drew just to give himself a vague sense of idea now I'm going to rub in some color his painting process takes a long time I'm only going to be doing this at one sitting with you he does one sitting walks away rests works for about an hour but he needed the oil paints to dry to keep building up the layers I won't have that luxury so I'm going to push that ahead by blurring in colors first let me show you the pette use some cobalt blue remember 1810 that's when this color comes in and here it is in a lead tube a cadmium yellow which was a new color this is a lizin crimson which is like a carmine and if I make a violet a deep violet out of this I can create a condition of simultaneous contrast the yellow is stronger because the Violet is next to it they're opposite colors on the color wheel the other issue is called successive contrast if I take this dark color and I make a dark Square out of it now I'm going to do the same thing with yellow right beside it that light looks brighter than that light because the contrast level is greater here than it is here that's successive contrast these were all principles that shev rule put in his book principles of color Harmony and contrast 1839 principles that will change the course of painting shru discovers that we prefer relationships of color that are opposites and so Monae knowing this paints with that simultaneous contrast principle let's get some more those colors up let's get that synthetic ultramarine blue some brilliant Rose emerald green and a copper BAS azerite blue hooker's green here goes some Violet so I'm going to look out to immerse myself in the experience that's how you paint this kind of painting I admired his inversion of ideas so I could put the sky at the bottom and the trees at the top by reflection something that would reflect the kind of ideas Monae used turning the world upside down the idea of the floating world is something that he inherits from Japan the whole concept of the Edo period Japan and the wood blocks I'll borrow some of that ultramarine [Music] blue and then a little bit of that green watching him paint people said I only see a mess I see chaos it's just a slow development of something that shows the feeling not a copying of a scene that's the universe life out of Chaos I'm thinking about a design in the loose way he thinks about a design right now I have an advancing wedge I'll offset that advancing wedge I might want to put it this way or this way but he's thinking about a design very covertly it's very subtle but it's there so the brain can read space there's no Horizon and to the white I forgot to put the white up I can't make tints without white these tubes really liberated painters so we have pre-stretched canvases portable easels this made the Advent of impressionism and the portable landscape painter is possible you may not see this I'm squinting like this at the candas squint kind of a Clint Eastwood style squint and the reason for that is it puts things out of focus I don't want things in Focus I want to use a part of my brain that doesn't use my folial vision that's the part of the brain that reads words I'm not trying to read words I'm trying to get a sensation here and that means I can't focus on anything and the squinting helps do that it also heightens values now the danger with the white paint is that if I mix more than a couple of colors in that white it's subtractive mixing less light less color less luminance get back to the eye and so the paintings look dingier and chalkier fact that's a constant criticism of impressionist painting is that they look chalky well sometimes things are chalky but the more colors you mix the dead and the less light goes back to the eye the color and the reflections aren't as intense as the colors that are throwing the reflections that's because lights bouncing off of the trees and the irises in into the water you're getting a secondary effect he's right on the edge of abstract expression and in fact the abstract expressionist will hold him as a hero 50 60 years later make them a little deeper now that's a chalky color but here I want a chalky color if it's against a strong color then the contrast of something chalky vibrates the impressionist painted with opaque colors they weren't as interested in glazing but putting colors side by side for effect let me go to another bigger brush in fact I'm going to scrub and pull out some lights and push some things around like I just heard a frog go for a swim see the vertical and the lateral that floats on top of the vertical and it's this cross-hatch pattern that gives you a sense of reflection clo Monae was a little controlling he had an obsessive nature he picked the colors for the house he picked the recipes for dinner because he collected recipes now he lived with probably the most compassionate person he could hope to live with Alice hos who he married after his first wife Camille dies now this pink offers and if I add a little yellow to it more of a simultaneous contrast against the blue green and now the picture starts to jump as a stronger vibration his canvas can show through in certain areas the threads and the texture of the canvas in other areas the paint is thick just like the surface of this Lily Pond now I've gooped some paint on and I'm going to push it back into the surface of the pond these skylights that come through and I'll do that by just dragging to get the Shimmer and the feeling of a little movement because the water isn't still it has a subtle movement I'm going to now float some things on the surface of this upside down World remember he didn't paint the world upside down he painted Sensations that were visual now I'm trying to get it just right because values are what's important here if my values are too light or too dark I won't have something that sits on the surface big circles close small circles farther away that's perspective Monae had an interesting piece of advice for all artists the bigger the vocabulary of Strokes the more interesting the paintings and it's the ambiguity of is it on the surface is it underneath the surface which is what ambiguity heightens participation in the viewer that's one of the things impressionism discovers you can project what you think you see through ambiguity if it's out of focus the mind will put it back in focus in the early 1870s France goes to war the Franco Prussian War it's a disaster for France while that's happening Monae and pasaro go to London where they seek out the paintings of Turner and Constable they have some hardship there but they discover the light and experiments of Turner how he uses atmosphere and how he dissolves edges and they discover in the Landscapes of constable greens they'd never seen in paintings before and it's that emerald green that becomes one of the keyn note colors for the impressionist palette they come back inspired from those English landscape painters if my values are too light or too dark then I won't have something that sits on the surface and as the lies go from larger to smaller your perception of space is that it's going from forward to back and spite of the fact that the darks are in the back instead of in the front and I'm thinking about colors that might not actually be there they're just alluded to if I see a little bit of something pinkish in a glow I'll amplify the pink now that's actually a neo-impressionist a PO impressionist idea Goan told shyak and others the way to paint a color is to exaggerate the color where you see yellow pain lots of yellow but what Monae does is he's doing that subtly putting up a little more of that color than is present the pink is a compliment to all this green and I need compliments otherwise it's an analogous Harmony all blues and greens the yellows the corals the Reds they're the opposite so that's why he puts them in I lifted up the lip of that Lily just to give you a greater sense of surface we're hardwired to put things into symmetry that's why I have this angling this way before it just offset the middle asymmetry creates an impression of more movement and after all they want to create a good impression and creating a line that goes this way this way this way to pull you back into that space a meander an ancient river in turkey that s that Serpentine shape the Chinese use the shape of the serpent the same shape see in that puddle of blue green how that pink just jumps lurches he agrees OBS skewer and bleed the softer the edges the more volume the tighter the edges the less volume this is just a peculiar phenomena what's called gradual transition if you see something a territory that is transitioning very gradually you think space the Sky Open Water if you see a territory that abruptly changes from gradual transition to an edge You Name It We name and we identify on the basis of abrupt Transitions and mon is interested in gradual transitions with a smattering of abrupt transitions which you will call lies that's more opaque paint a little overlapping so that they float on the surface put a little more light right up there he could enrich his Blues later maybe enriches pinks but a beginning remember he paints for about an hour then say to that's it come back later we should keep his method in mind the beginnings are where the feeling lies where the impression lies and that's what Koo had told Monae trust your first impression I'm David Dunlop I'm a landscape [Music] painter [Music]

Channel: David Dunlop and SimmonsArt

Views: 384,839

Keywords: David Dunlop, Monet, Painting, Oil Painting, Landscapes Through time, PBS series, painting water, painting gardens, gardens, oil painting, contemporary oil painting, landscape painting, learn to oil paint, learn to paint shells, Monet’s Waterlilies, painting lilies, painting flowers, painting waterlilies

Id: YpmdlAi0IUY

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2013