Something special happened that awakened me to the nature of art and the potential of color. It was a pivotal moment for me at a time when I might have gone in any direction. A random encounter with Monet at the Art Institute of Chicago ended up changing everything for me.
For context, I'm originally from Minnesota, and my family had no artistic or creative inclinations. Art was something that was formally practiced by Artists, and our encounters with it were formal and cultural. In this case, the Monet Retrospective in the mid 90s was a cultural phenomenon, and created FOMO before people even knew such a thing existed. It was kind of like King Tut, with the crowds drawing more crowds.
So we had planned a cultural junket to Chicago to experience this cultural phenomenon. I had been to many museums before, but not many of the 'fine art' kind. By this time, I was in my mid 20s and an aspiring designer who had yet to encounter the deeper currents of art and design. The fact I had chosen to be a designer was shocking, because I had a creative side that no one else in my family had, so it was met with suspicion.
In the midwest at the time, art and aesthetics were enjoyed as a means of cultural betterment, in other words, it was a something you did in order to impress other people, and maybe learn something new. It was a badge to display to show others that you were 'cultured' and somehow one up on them. What happened at the exhibition was like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. Here is how I remember it now:
I was moving through the galleries, looking at pieces from Monet's greatest themes, from the Cathedral to the trains at Rouen, from the haystacks to the waterlillys.
I was uneducated about art and art appreciation, only knowing that Monet was famous and important, up there with Picasso, perhaps the only other artist I could name at the time.
From my background, artists were people who could draw or paint 'good,' meaning they were skilled at painting or drawing something that looked like the thing they were representing, and so, the best artists were those who were really good at figuration and realism.
The lightning bolt of realization was Monet blowing this idea out of the water; There was no figuration, in the sense of a sketch outline; up close, the apparent subjects and forms disappearing into dibs and dabs and overlapping brushstrokes that had an almost random appearance until you pulled out enough to see the relationships from a greater distance. As an art novice, this first hand understanding of what Impressionism really is was a powerful realization.
This was my first encounter with abstraction, and the shock was the realization that art was the way an artist could communicate their perception of a scene or thing without resorting to realism, and that a seemingly loose arrangement of forms artfully constructed could do something to the eye to make your brain see something much greater. Pow!
After that realization, I reviewed the works with a new level of understanding, amazed by moving from near to far and watching as the atomistic brushstrokes resolved into striking imagery full of life, with color playing a crucial role.
Monet was, after all, one of the great colorists, even if he didn't make it a central theme of his work in the way the likes of Matisse or Derain, did. He was after perception, which color and light play a huge role in, however, color was a means to his ends.
His serial works like the haystacks or Roen, showing the changing effects of light and perception during different times of day and the year, were the revelations that won him fame during his time all the way to the current day, where throngs of midwesterners gawked with awe at his achievements.
For me, his Water Lillies works were the main attraction, the blues and greens playing with a dark background were an artistic representation of similar views I had seen growing up in Northern Minnesota, with cool shaded waters and lilly ponds scattered under summer clouds in a blue sky.
I remember feeling strange, shocked, elevated afterwards. Something changed inside of me, a switch was flipped and I saw things differently after that. I began to pursue art, first in understanding it and then to making it. That thrill I experienced with Monet has led me to museums around the world, and most importantly, it eventually led me to move to New York to pursue my MFA and dive even deeper into art.
As a painter's painter, Monet's work hasn't directly affected my color work, given that I work in a different medium and a different style, however, his spirit of impressionism through abstract form and color fundamentally influenced my artistic worldview and the core of my perception.
This chance encounter still amazes me after all these years. It set me on a long and rewarding road of discovery through art + color, a journey that I'm still on.