So back in the Bay Area, we went to the “Monet in Normandy” show at the oddly named (after a building in Paris) Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco. (Though this obelisk picture is still left over from Gettysburg.)
It was a Tuesday morning, but crowded anyway, mostly with people even older than us. Vacationers and retirees! My people. In the long line for the cafeteria you can look at some cool thousands-of-years old bottles with great iridescence built up on them.
When I don’t see Impressionist paintings face-to-fact for awhile, I start to think of them as kind of boring crowd-pleasers. But Monet really is a genius. The compositions are so nice. And the way he peck-peck-pecks all those colors.
A big gain from visiting an art museum is that it temporarily jiggers the way I see things. After studying the Monets for awhile, the outer world began looking Impressionist, too. I saw this near the Golden Gate bridge, on Baker Beach after the show.
Although I can’t own a Monet, I live inside a bunch of them. This is a hill above Los Gatos yesterday.
I actually carried a small canvas up there and tried to emulate Monet by painting en plein air. It was 98 degrees in the shade. I was sitting on some ants; they crawled into my shorts and pinched me on the balls. I respect Monet more than ever!
Although my painting is still weak (I hope to make it slightly better), the effort amped up my Monet-vision even more. I could see lots more colors, as in these PhotoShopped bushes at Baker Beach.
It also struck me that in fact we can't ever capture what it is that we see. No two photos are the same, and espeically when you get an image into PhotoShop you see how many choices there are to make — the camera defaults are just one of an infinity of options. And paintings vary even more (like this wonderful Monet). Human experience is evanescent and there really isn't any precise way to capture it. All the more reason to pay attention.