Monet Garden

Today was the visit to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, to take a look at MONET GARDEN. I could say "Unbelievable" and post this just like that, but here's a little bit more.

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Claude Monet’s artwork is amazing, and so different in many ways, showing what we perceive before nature. This reason also makes this artist one of the ‘fathers of Impressionism’.

The repeated elements in every painting make his work easily recognizable: The large brush strokes, the bold colors and the way he got to comprehend how to represent light.

While many painters strived for perfect representations of the reality around us, Monet used overlapped large brush strokes to create some kind of personal interpretation of the things he painted. The bold colors played an important role to feel the way he managed to create such and interesting lighting and shadow effect as we don’t see too much black in his work, instead we get this thick layering that transmits the presence of light by combining many colors to create darker areas and therefore a harmonious contrast.

One of the paintings I liked the most was a huge canvas (200x200) named “Water lilies and reflections of a willow tree”. It was very relaxing and calm even though it is mostly composed of dark tones from green to violet. You can actually feel the reflection of the willow tree in the water, all around the water lilies. When you look at this work you can follow the movement of the strokes, it’s like a perfect mess that produces the water sensation, maybe combined with the things he felt when he painted it. Wonderful.

Personally, I think that what Claude Monet was trying to say with his work is ‘to show the world and the atmosphere that surrounded him’ in the way his eyes and entire being could perceived. He mentioned in several quotes that it takes time for someone to become part of a space and once he got that with what he had, there was no other reason to stop painting and showing it. Besides, it is extremely beautiful the way he shows us persistence and admiration, because he painted his garden so many times and every single work seems to have its own story. Every combination of colors he used, and the movements of the brush strokes in the canvas trigger some kind of emotion, rhythm and create that strange feeling of inexplicable balance and harmony.