I have been recently watching a show on PBS's Create TV which features a plein air landscape painter by the name of David Dunlop.  The most recent episode took place at the setting of Monet's gardens in France.  Dunlop spoke to a few ideas which as a painter you hear quite often but really may not fully embrace until you see a great example. He referred to Monet's Water Lilies when he said that "the vocabulary of brush strokes makes a painting more interesting."  Quite often it seems to me that the only approach to achieving a level of success in a painting has been through the tireless rendering of a subject and it is in Monet that we find a confidence to paint with an implied gestural looseness.  He went on to talk about soft, blurred edges and how as a viewer, the mind wants to complete the image.  In this way, the painting takes on a more interactive quality instead of a dictated form of hyper realism.  Essentially, the softer edges create greater volume and harder edges conversely, less volume.  And finally, in speaking about Impressionism, I think it is only fitting that I end with a paraphrased quote from Corot to Monet "Trust Your First Impression."  In other words, that in the initially moments of a painting does the artist truely capture the energy, feeling, and gesture of a subject and it is these first impressions which we as artists should strive to maintain trhoughout the painting process.

-W.S.