Artist of the Floating World: Monet Up Close

More than any other Impressionist painter, Claude Monet sought inspiration from light as it falls upon his favorite landscape of ponds and water, flowers and trees. Motif for him was secondary; light was everything. So important was it that he often made multiple images of more or less the same scene to capture the instant when just the right amount, intensity and slant of light spread over everything. It is this attention to the details of light’s effects on what he painted that makes Monet’s art supremely atmospheric, whether it was a river scene at the break of dawn, or his beloved Giverny garden pond lit gloriously by the afternoon sun. You saw some of that artistic passion in yesterday’s post where I included a few of Monet’s famed water lilies pictures . I want to complement that post with a zoomed-eye’s view of Monet’s pictures as a sort of tribute to the man for whom the play of light and shadows was primary to the way he thought about nature’s beauty.

A Close Up View of Monet’s Paintings