“Ce Que J’eprove:” Grainstacks, Writing, and Open Spaces

17 "Ce Que J'eprove:" Grainstacks, Writing, and Open Spaces Bonnie S. Sunstein An Allegory On a crisp winter day in 1890, Claude Monet stood at an easel, painting one of the grainstacks in the field behind his house. The sun moved and he noticed a shifting effect on the stack. He demanded that his stepdaughter run back into the house to get another canvas. As soon as she had prepared one canvas, slogged into the backyard and delivered it, he'd ask for another. "Another," he demanded, "another again," and his stepdaughter spent the day running back and forth, stretching and tacking canvases and lugging them out to him while he painted what he saw in the shifting light.1 (Tucker) Issues of gender and servility aside, Monet's artistic vision broke the very rules which had governed his art. How Monet looked determined what he saw, and what he saw determined how he looked. He shifted his view with the shifts of natural light—in his subjects, in his techniques, and in his renderings. Maxine Greene writes that when artists shift their views in innovative moments, they build their creations by breaking the rules of their disciplinary histories: "There is a sense in which the history of any art form carries with it a history of occasions for new visions, new modes of defamiliarization, at least in cases where artists thrust away the auras, and broke in some way with the past." (130) What happened as the sun offered Monet another view of each grainstack? What disciplinary histories and artistic auras did he throw away in order to capture his new visions on canvas? What visions prompted him to envision multiple canvases? And how did he invent a process for rendering those impressions? During the winter of 1890-91, Monet produced twenty-seven paintings of grainstacks (Tucker, 77). With each grainstack, he painted its unique features as it sat in the field at a particular time of day. With each canvas, he built on the knowledge of the previous one. He wrote to his sister Alice, "I felt that it would not be trivial to study a single motif at different hours of the day and to note the effects of light that from one hour to the next as they modified the appearance of the buildings . . . I see motifs where I did not see them at first... I find my first studies very bad; they are laboriously done, but they have taught me to see." (Gordon, 9) Monet discovered the complexities of a single motif as he looked more and more closely. And how does this moment in art history offer an allegory for us in education studies? Our own disciplinary history is shifting now to include contexts—the spatial, the historical, and the human influences—inside which students learn. Greene observes that as we build "new modes of defamiliarization" we reconfigure our art. Our disciplinary history becomes our art, notes Elliot Eisner, when we apply our private educational connoisseurship to the "artful science" of educational criticism; what he calls "connoisseurship with a public face" (1991, 86). We rely on context to understand ourselves and others, Elliott Mishler reminds us (1979, 2). His studies of workplace narratives (1990,415) argue that "trustworthiness" is a form of validation in research. Our very knowledge about learning has enabled us to re-define the spaces in which people learn. To study those spaces, as Greene describes of artists and Mishler of contexts, we break our own disciplinary rules, "thrust away the auras," and create new ways for rendering what we see. Monet wrote to his friend and biographer Geffroy that in his art he was trying above all to render "ce que j'eprove." The verb "eprover" has no real equivalent in English. "To experience," "to demonstrate," or "to feel" are close, explains art historian Paul Hayes Tucker. But the implications in French are thicker, deeper, more complex. The term means participation in or perception of an event and those feelings directly associated with it. But Monet's term evokes a whole range of sensations, with "things revealing themselves slowly so that they become known in their fullest dimension. So...