“The wealth I have come from nature, nature is my inspiration.”
– Claude Monet
If you are interested in painting, you have definitely come across one of Monet's "Water Lilies". The water lilies series are Monet's most famous works that marked the last period of his life.
Disappointed in traditional art classes at the art school, Monet never liked being limited to classrooms. After meeting the French landscape painter Eugene Boudin, he adopted the understanding of painting outdoors, which would affect his entire career. They became the pioneer of Impressionism (impressionism) movement with a group of painters who shared the same thoughts. For Monet, painting nature was a passion. It aims to capture the essence of the landscape by transferring the light transitions and reflections to the canvas with different paints and to give the same impression to the viewers.
“Methods change but art remains the same; because art is an effective and emotional interpretation of nature. ”
– Claude Monet
Nilüferler’in ortaya çıkışı
Monet has created its own gardens as a kind of open air studio in many places where it lives. After overcoming financial difficulties in 1883, he settled in a garden house in Giverny, a small town outside Paris. There he built a huge artificial pond full of water lilies and a Japanese-style bridge over it. He covered the pond with willows, shrubs, bamboo trees and exotic flowers. He built a glass-walled studio on the side of the garden and installed a wheelchair easel, which he could rotate freely around the room. There he painted his water lilies, the reflections of willow leaves on the surface of the water, the Japanese-style bridge at many hours of the day and in many different ways, based on the change of light.
"My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece."
– Claude Monet
In 1914, the then prime minister and Monet's friend, Georges Clemenceau, encouraged the artist to work on a series of large canvases showing water lilies. From that moment until his death in 1926, Monet's main occupation was these giant paintings. It took too long to complete the paintings due to many reasons such as increasing pessimism, finding the paintings he made insufficient, and his eyes deteriorating. He gifted the great water lily paintings he called the Grande Décoration to the nation of France. The paintings are still on display at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris. The book "Mad Enchantment" written by Ross King, which covers the stage of construction of the paintings, the problems Monet experienced at that time, and his negative attitudes towards his environment, sheds light on some of the facts behind these masterpieces.
In these last paintings of Monet, brush strokes and colors depicting flowers and water are significantly different from early Impressionist techniques; from time to time they reach the passionate intensity of expressionism to evoke the beauty of the water surface. These works, which refused to focus the eye in one place, by simplifying the composition, disappearing contours and borders, and using pure and vivid colors, actually paved the way to abstract painting. With these features, Post-impressionist, Expressionist and Abstract expressive movements that came after him influenced. Especially in the 1950s, the pioneers of the abstract movement in America, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko are said to be inspired by these paintings of Monet.
Monet, who started having vision problems in 1907, was almost completely blind in 1923. In this period, there was a general redness in his paintings and the images were seriously spoiled. Cataract surgery took place in 1923 as a result of Clemenceau's insistence. However, in 1926, when he was 86 years old, he died of lung cancer in his beloved home in Giverny.
Monet devoted the last 30 years of his life to painting water lilies in particular. It has left over 250 lotus images that are still the most beautiful pictures of nature and flowers in the world.
Kaynaklar:
https://myartpoint.com/2018/08/03/claude-monets-love-affair-with-nature/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet
https://www.reproduction-gallery.com/oil-painting/1568351806/water-lilies-detail-1-by-claude-monet/
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/16568/water-lilies ,https://www.claude-monet.com/waterlilies.jsp
https://www.ideelart.com/magazine/monet-and-american-abstract-expressionists