ABSTRACT
The meadow is no longer a green card scattered with cutout plants, but a rich loam matted with plant life and moving with living shadows. Monet’s texture strokes help that happen by raising glints of light that sparkle randomly among the painted stalks and leaves, confusing the eye and mimicking the hopeless chaos of an actual field. In this detail, the raw canvas shows through in a couple of places: one of them is just at the end of the snaking blue mark, short of the Emerald Green. Chemistry cannot help to define Monet’s mixture, since the ingredients have to be adjusted depending on the picture, the passage, the weather, and the oils and colors that happen to be available. Every act of mixing has to start from scratch, resulting in a batch that is infinitesimally different from every other.
