For some reason, all through art school, I had very little interest in Monet, although I do remember a student in class sharing an art book that we flipped through together, and I began to realize how Monet had done a series of very similar paintings of a cathedral, and then later in the book, he had done a number of very similar paintings of hay stacks in the fields. My fellow student said that she found these series interesting, and pointed out that Monet was looking at how light played on these places at different times of the day. So Monet would paint the setting in the morning, and then he woud paint it again, at high sun, or during sunset – or on a cloudy day, and again on a sunny day. These types of images, then, become more interesting to me as you see them as a series, and not just as a stand-alone piece. And from a comic book point of view, they become narrative, or filmic, rather than one moment in time – because it documents changes in time.
When I began my comic, Brush with Peril, referencing art by Monet was the last thing on my mind. I thought of him as a painter of parks and plants and “girly things” that weren’t suitable for a manly man like me who only enjoys spies and fast cars and sports and guns and other manly things like that. HOWEVER, spy novels have to have suspenseful scenes on trains, and when I started looking for train themes in the history of art, a number of Monet’s paintings popped up, and I realized that this too was somewhat of a series he had dabbled with. In fact, this is considered his first series of paintings that concentrate on a theme. AND I really liked this series, so I would say that Monet’s trains were my gateway drug into an appreciation of his work.
