“My only merit lies in having painted directly in front of nature, seeking to render my impressions of the most fleeting effects.”
–Claude Monet
Claude Monet was born in Paris, France in 1840. When he was young he did not like being confined to a classroom and was more interested in being outside. He filled his school books with sketches of people, including caricatures of his teachers.
Monet loved to set up his easel outside and paint his pictures en plein air. He even had a small houseboat and would paint the scenes he saw from that view. Monet was a founder of Impressionist Painting. Monet would use strong colours and bold short brushstrokes. Turning away from the blended colours and evenness of classical art, he placed colours side by side to create a division of colours. The term Impressionism comes from the title of his painting: Impression, Sunrise.
In class we used oil pastels to draw our water lily and the rocks on the bottom of our pond. Students used pink chalk pastel to blend in the petal colour and finished with liquid watercolours to create the sky and pond water.