Name: Why Monet Painted The Same Haystacks 25 Times
Uploaded: 2026-01-21T16:50:24.000Z
Duration: 7 min 56 s
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Adverbs of manner

Well, Escape Into Meaning has officially been out for a full month.

I have been so moved by all your responses to the book and especially to everybody who came out to the events in Los Angeles and New York.

And all the pictures you guys are sending me of the book in your homes.

If you haven't gotten the book, I encourage you to do so in whatever form is best for you.

You can find the link for those below in the description.

If you like the Nerdwriter, I'm pretty confident that you'll like this book too.

Thank you guys so much and enjoy the video.

If you're obsessive about your work like me, you will absolutely find a friend in the French painter Claude Monet.

The founder of Impressionism, Monet was obsessed most of all with light and color and the ways they register in the human mind.

To capture these light and color effects, he rejected the popular conventions of his time, which prioritized line contour and blended brushstrokes that conceal the artist's hand in favor of several short, thick applications of solid color placed side by side, largely unblended.

The idea is that when you juxtapose two different colors, their contrast changes the perception of both.

It's an effect that you often see in optical illusions.

For example, look at the small orange squares in the center of these two larger red and yellow squares.

The right one looks considerably darker than the left one, but

when I remove all the colors around it, you can see that they are both the exact same shade of orange.

It's the contrast that produces this illusion, and

this contrast effect happens with every color juxtaposition, even if it's not always so noticeable.

Colors change the colors around them, and

when you add more and more colors, you get a wave of subtle cascading effects until what you see in a painting like this isn't so much colors, but

color relationships that seem to change and vibrate as your eye scans across the canvas.

Monet learned this technique from studying his influences, painters like Turner, Gustave Courbet, and Eugene Baudin, among others.

Monet helped to popularize painting, which is just French for outdoor painting.

He would take his canvas out into nature and paint directly from sight.

He watched the way sunlight transformed the colors around him and worked to capture what he observed in real time.

Here's Monet doing just that from a painting by his friend John Singer Sargent.

Painting outside this might seem like an obvious thing to do.

But when artists had to grind their own pigments or buy paints contained in fragile pig bladders.

The advent of tubes of paint, like these flexible zinc tubes invented by John Rand in 1841, in which the paint would not dry out, enabled a portability that made outdoor painting easy and feasible.

Here's a painting by Courbet himself on his way to work, where you can see that he has all the equipment he needs in a very mesh, manageable backpack.

Throughout the day, light and color are always changing.

At dawn and dusk especially, the world transforms a hundred times over.

Every few minutes, we experience a subtly different color palette, and

it's these ephemeral moments that Monet went outside to capture.

They come and pass so quickly that there's no way to recall them later.

In a sense, studio with any kind of accuracy.

Outside his house in Giverny, France, Monet noticed the way the light played off his neighbor's haystacks, as he later told the story, perhaps embellishing for effect.

He got two canvases and set out to paint the stacks in sunlight and then under cloudy skies.

But then he saw the haystacks in another light and quickly beckoned for his stepdaughter to bring another canvas.

And then he saw them in another light and asked for another canvas, and

In all, Monet painted 25 canvases of his neighbor's haystacks over a period of about seven months.

Often he'd take a dozen canvases with him at a time, switching between them as the day entered this and this, that transient phase.

The complete Haystack series is maybe the definitive expression of the impressionist movement.

In the same way that juxtaposed colors create a contrast effect in which a painting seems to come alive, these juxtaposed paintings of the same subject at several different seasons and times of day create their own contrast effect, each painting transforming the others, which is more spectacular than the sum of its individual works.

For me, what's evoked by this series is not the essence of Haystacks, but

a shocking reminder that every single day we travel in and out of dozens of worlds, we are temporary visitors in alternate universal universes of color.

Because the change is so gradual, we don't notice this in normal life, except for those occasional moments walking home at twilight or bringing out the trash after dinner when it hits us and we realize how strange and gorgeous the world really is.

In those moments I'm sometimes move to get out my phone and take a picture, but

it never ever comes close to capturing the truth of that moment's light and color, which is already gone by the time I look up again.

It's at moments like that when I'm grateful for the obsession of Claude Monet.

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