I grew up fairly unexposed to art that wasn’t of a fairly generic sort. Essentially stuff that was purely representational. Pictures of birds, hunting scenes, that kind of thing.
Monet, or at least the one I saw that made the school group I was with late because I was literally just standing there and gaping for a half hour, it was like looking at the world through a new pair of glasses after years of not knowing you needed them. Not because it was made things sharp, it was that he captured the beauty of things in a way I didn’t even know was possible.
It was so alive. There was so much movement and texture. It reminded me of when I would walk through the woods alone, everything unfolding around me in this riot of color and beauty as I discovered the next gap in the trees and stepped into a meadow.
It felt real in a way that photography couldn’t, that the more realistic painters couldn’t. Every inch I looked at unfolded another layer of the experience. Yes, it looked like the place, but it was more like being in that place than anything I’d ever seen before.
The fact that someone could transport me like that, and do it in such a seemingly impossible way was magical. This wasn’t art like in comic books, or on office walls, it was life, captured in this rippling, vibrant explosion of paint.
DC has a lot of Monet’s and it’s free to see them if you’re in the US.
What about them blew your mind? I thought they were pretty but didn’t have the same experience.
That’s where I saw my first one :)
I grew up fairly unexposed to art that wasn’t of a fairly generic sort. Essentially stuff that was purely representational. Pictures of birds, hunting scenes, that kind of thing.
Monet, or at least the one I saw that made the school group I was with late because I was literally just standing there and gaping for a half hour, it was like looking at the world through a new pair of glasses after years of not knowing you needed them. Not because it was made things sharp, it was that he captured the beauty of things in a way I didn’t even know was possible.
It was so alive. There was so much movement and texture. It reminded me of when I would walk through the woods alone, everything unfolding around me in this riot of color and beauty as I discovered the next gap in the trees and stepped into a meadow.
It felt real in a way that photography couldn’t, that the more realistic painters couldn’t. Every inch I looked at unfolded another layer of the experience. Yes, it looked like the place, but it was more like being in that place than anything I’d ever seen before.
The fact that someone could transport me like that, and do it in such a seemingly impossible way was magical. This wasn’t art like in comic books, or on office walls, it was life, captured in this rippling, vibrant explosion of paint.