This year, I am trying something new. Choosing one master painter as my mentor and guide for a whole season to learn their secrets and bring them back to my own art studio.
Welcome to The Monet Experiment!
In this post I outline the structure for my own study and practice with this prolific Impressionist master. My goals are threefold, enrichment of my art practice, a focused container for study, and most importantly, fun. Let’s dig in.
Apprenticing with a Master
This experiment is built on a simple idea: the best way to enrich a painting practice is to immerse yourself in a master who solved problems you’re curious about. So I’m starting with Claude Monet.
By using a single master as a guide for a set period, the experiment creates a container for creative focus and depth. I imagine it to be like spending a semester in Monet’s workshop… let’s see what he has to teach us!
Why Monet?
Sometimes we encounter an artist who we feel a deep and inexplicable resonance with, almost like we are following a path they’ve walked before. Monet is one of those artists for me.
Over the past couple of years, my painting practice has been moving in a clear Impressionist direction — toward botanicals, landscapes, and flowers, with an increasingly subtle color palette — so I thought why not go to the source?
Monet spent decades mastering the exact things I want to explore — color vibration in a subtle palette, the way a brushstroke can describe both light and form, and the courage to go big. I want to bring his techniques, his inspiration, and his hard-won wisdom into my studio and see what happens when they meet my canvas.
The Triple Threat
The Monet Experiment breaks artistic mastery into three learnable skills, studied one at a time, each one building on the last. Each area of study gets a deep dive blog post followed by studio practice in oil and watercolor before we move on.
🎨 1. Color
Optical mixing. Broken color. Temperature as light. How an Impressionist palette produces infinite variation.
🖌️ 2. Stroke
Economy of mark. Rhythm and direction. How the brush encodes movement, texture, and time.
🖼️ 3. Scale
Immersion. The body in relation to the canvas. How size transforms perception and demands different decisions.
We’ll start with color, digging into Monet’s palette, optical mixing, and broken color. Once those principles are metabolized, we’ll move on to stroke, looking at the anatomy of his brushwork and how strokes capture light and movement. Finally, we’ll put it all together with scale. Counterintuitively, Monet’s canvas kept getting bigger and bigger the older that he got.
The Weekly Rhythm
The experiment follows a repeating cycle each week. The research feeds the practice, and the practice generates questions that send me back to the research.
📖 Step 1: The Deep Dive
A blog post breaking down one specific technique or principle from Monet’s practice — the research that feeds the studio work.
👩🎨 Step 2: Oil Paintings
Apply the week’s principle on canvas. Texas subjects, structured constraints — testing Monet’s logic against my own work.
💦 Step 3: Watercolor Studies
Quick studies that strip the idea down to its essence — a fast, fluid way to explore the same principle from a different angle.
The Season at a Glance
Posts will publish weekly, with studio work happening in parallel:
- Master Study: Claude Monet’s Water Lilies
- The Palette as Instrument: Monet’s color
- Stroke of Genius: Monet’s brushwork
- Body and Canvas: Monet’s Scale
- Painter’s Notes: Studio updates, ink studies, what’s working
If you’re a painter looking for a framework to structure your own study of a master, you’re welcome to follow along and adapt this experiment to whoever and whatever calls to you. The structure works with any artist. Monet is just my entry point.
Where the Experiment Gets Personal
Ten years ago I left a corporate career to become a painter and it has been a wild ride!
During this decade of figuring out how to be an artist, my sanctuary became a garden that I’ve been growing from scratch a on a quarter acre in Texas. More and more, that garden has become muse. Sound familiar?
When I learned that Monet moved into Giverny in his forties, nearly broke, then spent a decade cultivating his garden before he began painting it, something shifted for me. It gave me permission to embrace my own way. The artist’s path is long, and it doesn’t move in a straight line. This experiment feels like a beautiful daily reminder of that.
xo. Jess
“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”
-Claude Monet