From “Water Lilies” in Plant Discoveries: A Botanist’s Voyage through Plant Exploration by Sandra Knapp:
“It took the remarkable abilities of a French horticulturalist, Joseph Bory Latour-Marliac, to change the world of water-lily culture. Inspired by an article written in 1858 lamenting the lack of bright colours and exquisite shapes in hardy water lilies, Latour-Marliac set about changing things, and judiciously crossed the brightly coloured tropical species…. It took him thirty-two years and his hardy successes… are still immensely popular….
“Producing some seventy beautiful varieties in the years he spent breeding these plants, Latour-Marliac’s work was then carried on by his son-in-law and by others all over the world. Just how he obtained his hybrids is not known, for their parentage was never revealed and he kept his methods strictly secret….
“Since water lilies are easy to propagate vegetatively by rootstocks, his cultivars are still available and have in turn been used in hybridizations for the creation of more new hardy varieties. Growing water lilies en masse creates a marvellous impression; indeed, many consider Claude Monet’s magnificent series of paintings of water lilies at Giverny (his garden in northern France) to be the epitome of Impressionism. Monet was the leading spirit of the Impressionist school, and he painted the world as he saw it — quivering with light and atmosphere. He and Latour-Marliac were exact contemporaries and the first of the water-lilies series was painted in 1903, twenty-four years after Marliac’s first hybrid successes had been introduced to the gardens of the time. The pale-pink water lilies in Monet’s exquisite Giverny masterpiece are Marliac creations — another incidence of the inspiration these most wonderful of flowers have given to all sorts of people.”
From “The Landscapes of Water” in Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King:
“[Monet’s] goal, which he frankly admitted was unattainable, was to paint his carefully chosen object… under singular and fleeting conditions of weather and light. As he told an English visitor, he wanted ‘to render my impressions before the most fugitive effects.’ [Since] objects changed their color and appearance according to the seasons, the meteorological conditions, and the time of day, Monet hoped to capture their visual impact in these brief, distinctive, ever-changing moments in time. He concentrated not only on the objects themselves but also, critically, on the atmosphere that surrounded them, the erratically shifting phantoms of light and color that he called the enveloppe….
“But freezing the appearance of objects amid fleeting phantoms of light and air was no easy task… Recording the fugitive effects of color and light was integral to Monet’s art. Setting up his easel in front of Rouen Cathedral, or the wheat stacks in the frozen meadow outside Giverny, or the windswept cliffs at Étretat on the coast of Normandy, he would paint throughout the day as the light and weather, and finally the seasons, changed….
“Because lighting effects changed quickly — every seven minutes, he once claimed — he was forced, in his series paintings of wheat stacks and poplars, to work on multiple canvases almost simultaneously, placing a different one on his easel every seven minutes or so, rotating them according to the particular visual effect he was trying to capture…. In the 1880s the writer Guy de Maupassant had likewise witnessed Monet ‘in pursuit of impressions’ on the Normandy coast. He described how the painter was followed through the fields by his children and stepchildren ‘carrying his canvases, five or six paintings depicting the same subject at different times and with different effects. He worked on them one by one, following all the changes in the sky….’
“One irony of Monet’s approach was that these paintings of fleeting visual effects at single moments in time actually took many months of work.”
Hello!
This is the second of two posts with photographs of Water Lilies from Oakland Cemetery. The first post is Water Lilies: Botany, History, Art (1 of 2).
As I mentioned in the previous post, I had never photographed Oakland’s Water Lilies before. While I briefly had some Water Lilies in my own small backyard pond about a decade ago, they never bloomed because they couldn’t get nearly enough sun (most variants require close to a full day of sunlight), and my wee but voracious goldfish snacked on the plants roots, leaves, and stems. So they didn’t last long enough to get their pictures taken, and photographing Oakland’s was my first experience with these plants.
As a photographer without an aquatic camera and scuba gear, I’m limited to what’s visible above the surface, mostly, except for those plant stems we can see twizzling just below the water line. Despite the stability provided by each plant’s overlapping leaves, the slightest breeze — or the landing of a visiting pollinator — would send enough ripples through the pond to set the plants in motion and shift them out of focus. Exposure bracketing came in handy — where I set the camera to take a series of photos from a single shutter press — to freeze the plants in place. This is typical of my botanical photography — because plants wiggle around far more than we register visually — since I learned that I could pick from these multiple shots of the same scene and keep only those with the sharpest focus.
By far, the most challenging aspect of photographing these Water Lilies came from a combination of complex relationships between how flowers produce color, how we perceive color, how cameras interpret it, and how programs like Lightroom let us edit our photos. Here, for example, is one of the photos from the gallery below — which we would refer to as a pink Water Lily — taken when the sun was out, in its fully-edited, final version.
Because of the bright sunlight, however, the camera actually saw the flower like this…
… where the color red is highly saturated (especially toward the bottom of the flower) and red overpowers the subtle shades of pink or magenta tones the flower actually produces. In addition to red color blowout, though, note how the flower petals seem out of focus, and how that blurriness extends even to the yellow pistils at the center of the flower. These combined effects occur not just because of the color relationships and how the red tones are over-saturated, but because the flower petals themselves are quite translucent — so excess color seeps through different parts of the flower and we can no longer perceive sharp boundaries between individual petals or between the petals and the pistils.
Let’s compare the photos side-by-side. By substantially desaturating red (using Lightroom’s Calibration panel), the photo on the right more accurately represents the pink Water Lily as I saw it at Oakland. You should now be able to better differentiate individual flower petals, and see more contrast between parts of the flower. Nearly every photo in this entire Water Lily series got similar treatment, because nearly all of them have red, pink, or magenta variations in color — even those whose tones lean towards orange or yellow — and all of them have translucent flower petals.
So my first time photographing and processing Oakland’s Water Lilies turned into a series of learnings for me, linking color theory to post-processing to the botanical characteristics of color production in certain kinds of flowers, and, finally, to a better understanding of the effects of bright sunlight on plants and flowers containing colors like this. It resonated with me, then, to read about Monet’s obsession with repeatedly painting the same subjects (see the second excerpt above) in different light, and frequently painting the same (or very similar) scenes to present them in varying lighting and weather conditions.
One of Monet’s goals — “to capture their visual impact in these brief, distinctive, ever-changing moments in time” (excerpted above) — is not unlike any photographer’s goals, since as photographers we’re always dealing with “instants” that disappear as soon as the camera clicks. What we do next is up to us and can lead to many different results; but it seems that photography and painting, as creative processes, might have more similarity than is readily apparent, sharing similar concerns about lighting and color fidelity that we can learn from if we approach deliberately.
By looking through enough of the images in Monet’s series of 250 Water Lily paintings, we can also see how so many versions of similar subjects became both a botanical and environmental or ecological study, where Monet alternated between “zooming in” on individual flowers and widening the view towards the broader habitat. Of course, I’m co-opting photographic theory and language here and applying it to another visual art; Monet was believed to occasionally paint from photographs (considered scandalous, by some) but apparently preferred his “exposure bracketing” and different zoom levels in the form of jockeying multiple canvases. According to Mad Enchantment, “Monet’s apparent lack of interest in technologies such as photography and film is curious and even paradoxical in someone otherwise so obsessed with the immediacy of the visual impression.” But maybe it’s not that paradoxical, since all of Monet’s Impressionist paintings represent a kind of abstraction — in part, what Monet called enveloppe, or the depiction of impressions — where his visual language emphasizes relationships among color, light, and form rather than the more literal reproduction that a camera (or realistic painting) would render.
Thanks for reading and taking a look!
