My Best Impression

Impression Sunrise, 1872 via wikipaintings

In 1872 Claude Monet (unintentionally) created the Impressionist movement with his work, Impression Sunrise. Painted in the harbour of Le Havre, the artwork attempts to capture the fleeting 'impression' of a sunrise. It was painted quickly with the intention of translating the visual, physical 'effect' light has on a landscape, but more specifically on our individual perceptions of colour. It was criticised as unfinished. It was ridiculed as amateurish. Yet, it began a painting revolution, a reassessment of painting that claimed perception was more evocative of reality than was the precise mimicking of nature.

So, this morning it came to me that I would like to recreate my impression of light, landscape and perception. I was walking though a park in South West London just after sunrise. Although I instinctively reached in my pocket for my mobile, I had no camera to capture the moment (I had consciously left my phone at home). Without my camera I was able to actually experience the moment. I let go of the need to document and realised that whenever you take a photo of something you find yourself saying to the viewer 'oh, this photo doesn't do it justice.' That's because with the quick capture of a camera-phone we rarely capture our perception of the moment, our subjective experience, the impetus that drove us to take the photograph in the first place.

My thoughts turned to Monet. When he re-created his perception of these fleeting moments of light he did not do so to reproduce the presumed exactitude of vision, rather he intended to paint through the subjectivity of his temperament. Therefore, the precision is inherently flawed, but the finished work is far more emotive and revealing of his experience (he reveals his interest, himself as an artist, by what he chooses to focus on).

I am no painter, but I would like to try to re-create my impression of sunrise through what I can do as an art historian, write.

Impression, SW Park, London, 10 December, 2013, approx. 8:00

A dense layer of white fog clings to the frost-lined green grass. The cold damp gently embraces and encloses all life in its scope. As it rises from the ground it transitions to a smokey blue dew, fading as it reaches the tips of bare, needle-thin tree branches. Its heaviness returns to enhance the gray sheet of clouds and, together, they diffuse the early morning sun, making it glow and glisten like a soft, breakable, orange yolk. The whole of the light is what I have always imagined late autumn to be.

Not as good as Monet, but worth the experiment.