Art is best enjoyed over time. Seated. Quiet. Notebook and pen in hand.
I’ve always been drawn to write l for as long as I can remember, even scribbling in a notebook alone in my room, “writing” if my moms asked me what I was doing. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Reitzel, was the first person in my life to ask me to sit in front of art and think about it, write about, even draw it. (She did this because I asked for homework, if that gives you a sense of the type of child I was. My school, as a policy, didn’t assign homework to 5 year-olds.) When my mom took me to Billings Montana’s Yellowstone Art Museum I sat in front of a large-scale painting of a horse for what felt like forever. I made my best drawing of it and wrote a story that went along with it.
12 years later, during my summer writing program at Georgetown, we went to the National Gallery of Art. Again I was asked to sit in front of a piece of art that spoke to me and write. Once I found a piece of art that spoke to me, time flew by as I wrote and wrote and wrote about the woman in the portrait before me. More than a decade separates these two experiences, but they are foundational to the way in which I approach art and museums even to this day.
The Musée de l’Orangerie has to be one of my favorite museums in Paris. I always take extra time to absorb the beauty and complexity of Monet’s water lilies, which reveals itself over time. The sheer scope and scale of the works is at first overwhelming. I take a tour around the room, laid out to align with the cardinal directions and to allow in the diffuse, natural light from a skylight above. Then I sit in front of each of the massive scale works. I absorb their riot of colors: blue, purple, white, chartreuse, green, red, brown, and deepest navy. From close up the flowers on his pond become nonsense smudges and splashes of paint. I can see each of Monet’s individual brush strokes strewn about the canvas. It’s almost nonsense; a mess of color and technique and perspective without sky or backdrop to root it. The effect is dizzying. As I step back the images resolve themselves and become coherent. Here is a water lily. There is a flower. Here are rushes on the bank of the pond. There are the reflections of trees in the water. Soft, pink clouds swirl reflected in the water, all cotton candy puffs that catch the light as it fades from the sky above, from the larger picture we cannot see.
This is the sliver of his world that Monet has graced us with more than a hundred years later.
These oblong, curving works are all-encompassing. When I’m close to them they absolutely swallow me into their sunset and lilac universe. I feel I can step into these works. This is what I imagine heaven looks like. I hope my grandmother is in a place as beautiful as this one. This thought makes my eyes fill with tears. The trunks of the weeping willow trees are almost three dimensional, all reds and blues and mossy greens, their vertical lines contrast with the horizontal swirls in the rest of the work. The branches trail down, and I can’t tell where the branches end and the water, the reflection of the branches, begins.
Each work is a touch unfinished. The tops of the canvases often have bare patches, as if Monet were painting while standing on his own two feet and couldn’t quite reach the top. In some places he’s painted onto the golden frame of the paintings themselves.
In the Musée I observe the influence of social media, which has shrunk our collective attention spans to the diameter of a teaspoon. When I was last here in 2014, photographs weren’t allowed. Even talking wasn’t allowed, the room in a perpetual state of meditative silence. Now people rush in, phone on video mode, and scan the whole room. They take countless photos. They ‘look’ at the art while a friend captures the moment from behind. I watch as people come and go. They spend maybe 10-20 seconds in front of each huge piece. And then, within five minutes they move into the next room.
The sliver of perspective Monet has graced us with absorbs me completely. This is the genius of focus, of doing one thing so often that it becomes your metier, your iconic life’s work. This is the beauty of focusing on something for more than five seconds at a time, from pressing pause on virtual life, the likes, the fame, and the followers. Monet’s work came from silence and solitude and decades of dedicated work in pursuit of his art. Through his whole career he pushed boundaries and created art he thought worthwhile even though few of his contemporaries agreed. To weather a lifetime of criticism and ridicule from his community and to still create: that is dedication I can only aspire to.
The Paris Project
I’m Sarah, a travel and wellness writer based in the US. Join me on my 30-day journey in Paris as I post something new each day. You can follow along here on my blog or subscribe to my newsletter. I’ll send a weekly missive to all my newsletter subscribers while I’m here of all of my favorite Paris discoveries and adventures.
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