From Monet’s Garden to Macpherson’s Pond
By Jean Stern
Like no other artist, the Impressionist painter is beguiled by light. This passion draws the Impressionist out of the studio and into the outdoors, or as the French term expresses, en plein air. There, the Impressionist is in a constant struggle to quicken his technique, the better to capture natural light.
The French Impressionists of the 1860s and 1870s were essentially urban artists who recorded everyday life in Paris and its environs. A typical French Impressionist painting shows people walking on crowded boulevards, dancing and drinking in restaurants, relaxing in a park or enjoying a day on the Seine River.
By contrast, the American Impressionists of the 1890s to 1920s were not as concerned with city life as with the land. That preference continued the American passion for landscape, a lineage begun in the early years of the American Republic and carried into the nineteenth century by the Hudson River School, including Thomas Cole (1801-1848) and Asher B. Durand (1796-1886).
The tradition of American landscape painting is inseparable from the American spirit. From Colonial times, American art was governed by two factors that distinguished it from Europe: the absence of religious patronage and a penchant for portraying the everyday character of American life. Landscape painting was the ideal vehicle, for it expressed God and Nature as one. Moreover, it affirmed the metaphor of the American landscape as God’s gift to the American people. The land was a fountainhead of bounty and opportunity, and the artist’s objective was to carefully and accurately observe it. Realism and its variants was the style of choice.
When French Impressionism crossed over to American shores in the late 1880s and early 1890s it had a striking effect on American art by influencing not subject matter but rather technique. Impressionism encouraged the use of quick, choppy brushstrokes and the systematic application of brilliant pure color. Landscape remained a popular subject, then as now, and nature’s clear and intense light not only defined the landscape, it was the landscape.
The biblical analogy of light as the creative instrument is inherent in the landscape, for without the divine energy it represents, the land would not exist. Impressionists find their reason for painting outdoors in the landscape itself. At the same time, they confront their most rigorous challenge: to capture the brilliant, fluid visual sensation of natural light on canvas before it changes. It is the artist’s most difficult test, because we all know what light should look like. We have seen it all our lives. It takes only a glance at a landscape painting to determine if the light is accurate or “feels right.”
Today, relatively few artists are capable of tackling the landscape en plein air. The pressures are great, and it takes experience and confident drawing and knowledge of color to face the dual constraints of time and fleeting natural light. Plein-air painting is a portrait of one small moment of one day, which in itself is an arduous task. But what about portraying a week, a month or an entire year?
Kevin Macpherson began exploring the idea of capturing time on canvas in 1996. It was immediately apparent that he could not paint a year in real time, one day after the other. Travel, workshops, exhibitions and life in general made it impossible. So, he arranged his schedule to be at home to paint the pond a least once on every calendar day over a five-year period. By 2000, he had produced more than five hundred panels, which he narrowed down to the best example for each day.
The magnificent series of 368 paintings is a portrait of a year in the life of the pond: 365 days, one leap day, the last day of the century and the first day of the new millennium. But in reality, it is also a portrait of Kevin Macpherson—artist, husband, teacher and member of the human race. You know this not only by looking at the paintings but also by reading Macpherson’s journal notes.
In some instances, he expresses doubts about continuing his project: “For a moment I doubted that there could be other views of the pond and that I was repeating myself. But the pond proved me wrong.” (January 27). Well into the project, he observes that the result may be a year’s worth of paintings that look exactly alike. “By morning a foot of virgin snow had fallen. I watched as the clouds broke and a sundog appeared in the gray sky. Such phenomena made me reflect on the 368 different faces of the pond. I couldn’t invent them. I’m not that creative. Even though we come equipped with the same parts⎯two eyes, ears, nose and mouth—only God creates the vast variety found in the human face.” (January 22).
The most revealing journal entries are the ones that link life and art. “My moods and self-esteem were interlaced with my paintings. If I wasn’t able to paint, I felt frustration and guilt. When I painted well, I felt good, but when a painting failed to reach my desired results, I got depressed.” (June 25). “Is the painting more a reflection of the pond … or a reflection of myself? (May 7). “This was a moment when I wished I could stop the clock and savor the beauty for eternity. Special moments, like an embrace or the exhilaration of achievement, pass quickly but are forever cherished.” (September 21).
One of the entries reveals Macpherson’s connection to Claude Monet (1840-1926), who also worked in series, although he never painted a subject over an entire year. “I can see why Monet attacked his Parliament Series a minute or so at a time. So many light effects happen for a short instant making it difficult to get the whole envelope of light. I painted a cloud shadow that crept over the foreground. It lasted about five minutes. A cloudbank hovered over the mountain, which was blasted with pink light midway in the painting. This is why Monet switched canvases. But this effect may never appear again. I must try to capture its totality at once, which is why such a small format is necessary.” (April 4).
In 1889, after enduring nearly three decades of ridicule from the public and press, Claude Monet was identified as one of France’s greatest living artists and Impressionism was on its way to becoming the best-loved style in the world. Financially secure, Monet began to paint what truly interested him: light and atmosphere at various times of the day and seasons. He abandoned the figure and became a true landscape artist.
To explore the variables of light and color, Monet painted his subjects in differing natural conditions with minimal compositional changes. Although he had previously returned to certain subjects, such as train stations and fields of poppies, these were not the systematic explorations that are seen in his 16 views of Creuse Valley, which engrossed him for three months in 1889. The Creuse images are considered a true series because Monet planned, painted and exhibited them as a group. Among other true series are the 23 views of Meules, or grain stacks painted between 1889 and 1891, the poplars along the Epte River of 1891, and Rouen Cathedral, painted between 1892 and 1894. His Japanese bridge paintings begun in the late 1890s and the water lilies, started in 1899, were painted in his Giverny garden.
The Water Lilies Series went beyond all others. Not content with merely the visual effects of changing light and color, Monet used the water lilies to explore the subjective world of the artist himself and to redefine the meaning of art. Paradoxically the Water Lilies Series led Monet from his lifelong search for perceptual truth, one of the great virtues of Impressionism, to a search for conceptual truth, thereby linking him to the Modernists and Expressionists. That search captivated him until his death in 1926.
In all of his series paintings, Monet was unconcerned with the subject itself. Instead, he was obsessed with the variations of color and form that resulted when he saw the subject in differing light. He prepared canvases of approximately the same size ahead of time to ensure that the scale and scope of each painting was the same. He also worked from the same point of view and briefly sketched the subject before going into the field so that he could concentrate on the light and color of the moment. He took two or three easels and arranged the paintings in order, such as dawn, early morning and midday, working on each until it was time to stop and begin the next. The following day he repeated the pattern of the previous day’s work, and it was not unusual for him to work on the paintings in his studio, filling in the details from memory.
Like Monet, Macpherson was less concerned with the subject of the pond than with the visual effects of light at different times of the day and year. “The final five minutes of winter light were a glorious finale to the season. The light moved faster than I could paint, and I worried about the color relationships of the masses. When it went dark, I decided to draw and refine the shapes the next morning.” (March 19).
Unlike Monet, however, Macpherson chose a small format. In his words, “Painting small brings to mind studies such as Constable and Turner used in their development of ideas for large studio works. I too use this practice to train my eye, hand and mind to understand nature. However, just because a painting is small, it can be as complete as a painting of any size. All of the Pond Series paintings will be informative for future work—light, atmosphere and compositional arrangements. Each painting large or small has led me to the next and has brought me to new places. So the term study, which sometimes indicates unfinished, does not apply to the pond paintings.”
It is also fitting to compare Macpherson’s obsession with a pond to that of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). In his treatise Walden, published in 1854, Thoreau shares Macpherson’s philosophical vision of a pond as a metaphor of life and the passage of time.
Thoreau went to Walden Pond to become a part of and to muse on his role within nature. “Well, there I might live … and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through and see the spring come in…. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
In many ways, Macpherson’s Pond Series is a visual documentation of a journey into the spiritual significance of being an artist. As with Monet’s Water Lilies, Macpherson deals with the integrity of being an artist. That view was also shared by Thoreau, who noted, “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.”
Similarly, Macpherson noted, “In a world of instant gratification, this endeavor is not a concentrated hour. It is a daily contemplation. A yearly summary. A total of four years of dedication and determination to see its totality. We are so jaded and expectant of special effects and the ‘wow!’ of something extraordinary. Will nature, just as God intended, entertain by its mere ordinary display of daily effects?” (November 15).
Beyond being supremely beautiful paintings, the Pond Series is also Macpherson’s vision of life, and by extension the passing of a moment, never to return. On one tragic day, death itself became a contributor to the Pond Series. “This was a tragic week. I held my annual workshop for twenty-two eager students. … Enthusiasm and the art spirit were in the air. Near the end of the first day after several hours of painting the pond and wildflowers, we spent time getting acquainted. Each student had his or her reason to paint or not to paint. As many said, “Life gets in the way.” We must make the choice to find time to paint…. As we shared the art spirit, God took one of us to him. Barbara McBride, a 43-year-old geophysicist, plunged into a massive heart attack. We called 911, while three of us administered CPR. Neither our efforts nor those of the EMTs could save Barbara.” (August 4).
The pond is much more than a subject recorded throughout one year. It is a reflection of one year of life that defines all the individual years of our lives. The pond is Macpherson himself, but it is also you and me. The Pond Series represents a speculation on life that gives meaning to the passage of time. It celebrates that passage in statements of color and form, of light and atmosphere.
As Andre Malraux once said, “If we understood the enigmas of life, there would be no need for art.” In the Pond Series, Kevin Macpherson explores those enigmas and offers evanescent answers.
