I Copied Monet and I Liked it…

—Carol Marine, one of the founders of the Daily Paintworks website, set forth the challenge to “Copy and Learn”. Carol stated, “I believe that we can learn a lot through copying the work of those we admire. You can look at something all day long, and enjoy it, sure, but when you actually try to reproduce it, stroke by stroke, you finally grasp just HOW they did it. You find yourself asking questions like: what kind of brush did they use to make that mark?; and, what did they do first, next, etc.? It forces it you to step out of your own box and experiment in ways you would have never thought of. Your challenge this month then is to copy a painting by an artist you admire.”

I love Monet and have a small painting of his cut out of a magazine hanging in my studio so I thought I’d give it a go. I had never copied a masterpiece before.

Copying masterpieces is actually a legitimate business as long as it is labeled as a copy. Otherwise it is a forgery. If you can’t afford a $30 million Monet but want more than a print, there are artists who will paint a copy for you at anywhere from a few hundred dollars to many thousand dollars, as long as the image is now reached copyright free status.

I found this to be a hard but very enjoyable challenge. I had just watched a movie about the Impressionists and painting “Impression, Sunrise” seemed apropos.

Impression, Sunrise after Monet, oil, 8×10″