Tales from Giverny

I’ve given this blog a long rest, but I’m feeling inspired to share some TALES FROM GIVERNY, my new home…

Giverny is a village of 500 residents that sits on a bend of the Seine across from the town of Vernon, 45 minutes west of Paris by train. Giverny is where Impressionist painter Claude Monet lived the last half of his life and where streams of tourists come daily, from April till November, to enjoy the stunning beauty of the gardens he created and immortalized in many of his paintings.

I love photographing the gardens and often wish I could depict on canvas what I see through the camera lens. Sometimes I feel like a painter as I compose a shot, trying to capture the essence of Monet’s vision. I squint at the landscape, seeing the interplay of light and color that inspired not only Monet’s work but a painting movement that marked the beginning of modern art.

The unique light of the Seine Valley was what captivated Impressionists. The air has a vapory quality, tinged with morning mist and evening fog. The Impressionists were “plein-air” painters — they painted in the “open air,” adapting to changing light and weather conditions. Giverny experiences ever-changing weather, as fronts move across Normandy from the Atlantic to the west and the English Channel to the north. One day, in the span of an afternoon, I photographed Monet’s lily pond under brilliant sunshine, stormy skies, a lovely rain and then dewy twilight.

A few years ago, I tagged along with a painting group organized by American artist Caroline Homes Nuckolls and her photographer husband, Rich, the founders of Art Colony Giverny, whose week-long sessions in spring and fall give artists an opportunity to paint in the gardens and on location elsewhere in the area. I hadn’t painted since I was in first grade and loved learning how to mix paint and how to properly hold a brush. Caroline sent me home with several tubes of paint, but they sat in a drawer…until last week.

I asked Giverny artist Christian Avril if he would give me a painting lesson in the gardens. Chris is much beloved here, a French plein-air artist who can be seen around the village at his easel, in his colorful “artiste” attire. Here he is, arriving for my lesson at our rendezvous point in front of Monet’s house…

It’s possible to purchase a “Billet Artiste” — an artist’s ticket — that gives painters and photographers access to the gardens after hours, from 6-8 p.m. The cost is €9.50 (about $11), the same price as admission during the day. After 6, the gardens go quiet as the guards usher out the last of the daytime visitors. You’re then free to set up your easel or tripod and immerse yourself in the golden hours of evening.

As I followed Chris to the lily pond, I asked him where he got his vintage wicker painter’s trolley. “On the internet,” he said. I loved the irony of that.

My painting kit was cobbled together from odds and ends in the storage space next to where I now live. I felt emboldened carrying an easel that had belonged to the late Gale Bennett, who for many years was Giverny’s well-known American-artist-in-residence and whose studio had been on the other side of what is now my living room wall.

Chris made quick work of setting up on the little bridge at the far end of the pond. He laughed at Gale’s easel. “There’s a part missing here,” he said, jerry-rigging the top clamp.

On my painting excursions with Caroline, we had carried bottled water for our brushes. Chris’ method is more organic — he leaned over the bridge railing and swung a plastic container, at the end of a twine rope, scooping up water from the pond. I imagined little tadpoles swimming around the bristles of our brushes.

The subject of my first painting was to be Monet’s iconic Japanese bridge, cloaked in dark green wisteria vines, at the opposite end of the pond. At 6 p.m. in mid-September, the sun is low and the light fades fast. Chris asked me to outline in blue paint — a blueprint, essentially — the scene I intended to paint. He handed me a pad of paper to use as a palette and gave me a paint-mixing lesson.

“This is how you make the green of the bridge,” he said, swirling some cadmium yellow with phthalo blue.

“Okay, begin,” he said, grinning. “Good luck.”

I pretty much had no idea what I was doing. Occasionally, Chris, who was working on an immense canvas that had somehow materialized out of nowhere, would check on my progress. Looking at my tentative brush strokes, he said, “Gale Bennett would say, Don’t be bashful with your brush. Be bold.”

So I became even more emboldened. And slowly but surely, the magical alchemy of the color wheel began. I was boldly brushing cadmium yellow and Monet green on whorls of violet and magenta, creating the sun’s glow on the wisteria canopy. A daub of titanium white on a dash of pink and — voila! — a water lily was born.

It was a warm evening, with no chill in the air to warn me that the sun was setting. When Chris said, “Okay, the last thing you must do is paint the bridge,” I realized it had disappeared in the fall of night.

I conjured up my memory of it and carefully painted its outline against the foliage. The bridge is barely discernable in the finished work — true to my plein-air experience.

We quickly packed up, cleaning our brushes in the little tub of pond water. I laughed when Chris slipped his huge canvas into a nearby clump of bushes. “I’ll finish it tomorrow,” he said. I wondered if Monet had stored his works-in-progress in the bushes, too.

I loved my first lesson and went back the next night, a glorious evening that I spent photographing dahlias for a photo book of the gardens that I’ll be publishing soon. I decided my next painting would be of the Grande Allée, which leads from the entrance of the house down to the front gate. At this time of year, the nasturtiums that grow on either side of the Allée have almost completed their summer-long crawl to the middle.

I was the only artist in the gardens a few nights ago, when I painted the Grande Allée. As I drew my “blueprint” on my gessoed board, there was the sound of a vacuum cleaner and laughter in the house as staff closed up for the night. By the time I was filling in the details of the dahlias and the sunflowers an hour later, the sun was falling fast. When I put down my brush, I felt I had more to do (and so much more to learn), but I liked that the picture captures a fleeting moment — the last light of day.

I’m a rank amateur, but I’m really enjoying this painting thing. And what better place to learn, with wonderful teachers (including the spirit of Gale Bennett at my elbow) and Monet himself hovering in the ether.