Shopping for ideas

I’ve been visiting the National Gallery of Art in Washington on recent weekends.  Monet’s painting of his garden has been a particular destination.  I’m painting landscapes now, and I look at Monet’s surfaces and seek answers to questions that I’m encountering in my own painting.  I have five landscapes in the works at present, each in different stages of “almost there.” Mine are small paintings, 18 x 24 inches.  Monet’s painting is quite large. His measures almost 60 x 48.  The room is so large that the painting doesn’t seem that big when you’re standing in front of it, but — wow — it is. Some sense of the scale is available by seeing it with museum visitors.

Details of Monet’s painting are visible on NGA’s website.  You can zoom into the nuances.