ARTIST STATEMENT Monet was the founder of Impressionism. Anyone who takes their paints and easel outside today is in his debt. He was probably the first artist to suggest that an emotional response to the landscape, expressed in paint, was as valid as a topographically accurate rendering. And actually going outside and doing it was the best way of getting the authentic experience. It is important to note that Monet never spent time in Majorca; the journey in those days would have verged on the impossible. In the 1880s it was primitive, the roads travelled by mules and donkeys delivering goods from coastal harbours’ inland. Palma, the capital, was a bustling city with a thriving port, but most of the island had not changed for centuries. A far cry from the route he would have travelled to the south of France by train. I knew Monet had been painting along the south coast of France in 1884 (Antibes, Monte Carlo etc) and when my wife, Rosemary, and I were in Majorca, I was struck by how similar the island landscape was to the one that Monet had painted. On our second visit I took canvases and paints, and worked on studies that I endeavoured to turn into finished pieces back home in the studio. Some of the studies succeeded and some failed, but they all gave me that moment of actually painting from nature. Monet would have taken his studies back to Giverny to “work them up”, so I did the same.
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