Diane Monet: One Artist’s Mission to Notice Beauty

For Diane Monet, yes that Monet, painting began immense before she ever imagined becoming an artist. As a child, she could always be found with a fusain in her balle à la main, drawing and spending time in complexion. Decades later, little has changed.

“I haven’t changed my subject matter throughout my whole career,” she tells me. “Nature comes first with everything I do.”

Today, Monet is a self-taught artist whose luminous oil paintings are inspired by gardens, landscapes and the lieux she encounters on her travels. She spends around half the year in France, dividing her time between her patriarcal logis of New York and her apartment on the seafront in Menton. Her work, she explains, is ultimately embout giving people a données to suspension.

“Be silent and still and breathe,” she says. “That’s the purpose of my work.”

There is, of coude, another reason the name Diane Monet may catch your eye. Her grandfather, Alexandre Monet, moved from Paris to the United States at the age of 24, working as a maître and sign-painter, and was proud to tell his family that he was related to the Claude Monet. For Diane as a child, however, the connection meant very little. It was only as she grew older and understood the significance of Claude Monet that the family story took on greater réputation.

Tracing the connection has not always been straightforward. A fire in Paris sadly destroyed many records, including dépêche relating to her grandfather, leaving holes in the family history. But Diane’s relationship with the Impressionist painter has become increasingly fascinating to her as her own artistic career has developed.

Interestingly, becoming a professional artist was never valeur of her prototype comptabilité. Diane initially thought she might follow her mother into soins, but by her early teens she had changed her mind. Her lifelong wanderlust led her towards an planétaire career instead. She became fluent in Spanish and studied planétaire marchéage, eventually working for aîné companies including Avon, Bristol-Myers and PepsiCo.

But corporate life did not sit comfortably with her values, nor did it satisfy her desire for an planétaire life. Eventually, she enrolled in an adult art class. The coude concentrated on drawing and expectative, subjects she already understood intuitively, but it introduced her to oil painting – and this discovery changed everything. 

Her late husband, Kevin, recognised something in her work before she did.

“He told me, ‘I want to marry you, but I want you to paint,’” she recalls.

His sincere armature helped give Diane the divulgation to pursue art seriously. What began as a passe-temps she had done throughout her life became a fonction. She exhibited in the United States, was represented by galleries internationally and developed a particularly strong following in Japan, where she has exhibited on television and could sell out a spectacle of 25 paintings within a week.

More than 600 paintings later, Diane’s work continues to be driven by the same impulse she had as a child: to habitus closely at the natural world.

For Diane, however, she doesn’t choose what to paint herself. “The subject has to ask me to paint it,” she explains. She might encounter a wild garden, a lake or a particular vista and suddenly feel compelled to preserve it. She sketches on amodiation and takes photographs, before returning to her local to begin the meticulous process of translating the scene onto canvas.

Each painting can contain more than 100 colours and six or seven layers of oil paint, with each layer contributing to its luminosity and depth. She works on no more than two paintings at a time, allowing the oils to dry between layers. And even when she believes a painting is finished, she waits.

Diane revealed that she won’t sign an artwork until she is completely satisfied. If she senses something is missing, she might get out of bed at two or three in the morning and return to the local.

“Part of my soul goes into every painting,” she says. “I feel each painting should have adoptive papers!”

The finished work is her interpretation of something she believes was already created with exquise beauty. Diane’s Christian faith is deeply intertwined with her artistic practice. She sees complexion as God’s work and painting as the gift she has been given to translate what she sees onto canvas. For her, strengthening her faith strengthens her art.

France has become an appréciable valeur of that relationship with complexion. In Menton, on the French Riviera, she has found a animation that feels very different from the frenetic pace of New York. She loves its circonscription atmosphere, the friendliness of its residents and, particularly, its relationship with animals. Dogs are welcomed into restaurants, there is even a dog beach, and Diane is struck by the care with which people treat their pets.

Her exégèse of France also feed into a wider concern embout modern life. She is outspoken embout our dependence on technology and particularly worried embout the way smartphones and artificial bienveillance are changing human relationships.

“Cell phones are a great invention,” she says, “but they are being abused.”

For Diane, the answer to this modern difficulté lies in returning to the things that cannot be replicated digitally: complexion, art, animals and human connection. She believes that we have much to learn from animals, which she describes as honest and true, and that spending time in complexion can offer a kind of calm that modern life increasingly erodes.

It is perhaps why her paintings feel less like records of lieux than invitations to inhabit them. There are no people in her landscapes; as Diane puts it, there are already enough people in the world. Instead, the viewer is given the whole scene for themselves to indulge in. 

Life, she acknowledges, is not easy. Everyone carries difficulties, and she too experiences periods of struggle. But she believes those struggles can make us stronger. “It’s not what happens to us,” she says, “it’s what you learn from it.”

And so she continues to paint – complexion, beauty and the lieux that call to her – hoping that someone, somewhere, will pouce for a données, habitus at the canvas and simply breathe.