Nymphaea Lilies: Theme of Claude Monet's Magical Paintings

Nymphaea Lilies 

Theme of Claude Monet's Magical Paintings

Dr Abe V Rotor

Photos taken by the author at Monet in Paris Museum

 in Brisbane, Australia July 26, 2023 

"What a genius to make a masterpiece with the last rays of the sun, 

drawing each like thread and weaving the aging colors of rainbow; 

while thousands at their bidding rise early to catch the rising sun,

aiming at fortune - and failing - search it at the end of the rainbow."

                                                                                                      ~  AVRotor     

Inspiring quotes from Claude Monet for young artists

• I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

• Color is my daylong obsession, joy, and tormentI'm never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

• When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow.

• The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.

• Now I really feel the landscape. I can be bold and include every tone of pink and blue: it's enchanting, it's delicious.

• For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment.

• “Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”

• “The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.”

 

Paintings of Waterlilies by Claude Monet projected on giant screens at Monet in Paris Museum in Brisbane, Australia.  Photos taken by the author on July 26 2023

“The real subject of every painting is light.” - Claude Monet

Author's grandchildren play on an miniature garden, with a bridge across a pond of waterlilies, a masterpiece of Claude Monet at Monet in Paris Museum in Brisbane, Australia July 26, 2023 

Author's family peacefully listen to Meditation by Monti (from the Thais), Camille Saint-Saëns, The Carnival of the Animals,  Tchaikovsky's The Dying Swan, and other post-romanticism music that fit perfectly with the ambiance of Impressionism led by Monet.

 which revolutionized art in the later half of the 19th century.

 “I want the unobtainable. Other artists paint a bridge, a house, a boat, and that’s the end. They are finished. I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat, the beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible.— Claude Monet 

 

Monet's waterlilies amateur versions of the original as shown below. 

Claude Monet (1840-1926) painted his famous murals Waterlilies towards the end his long productive life as an impressionist. He worked with fading eyesight and in frail health. Few men have shown such an extraordinary feat. Among them was the great modern painter Pablo Picasso. Ernest Hemingway's Nobel prize winning novel, The Old Man and the Sea, pictures such rare quality with sweet irony of anonymity.

“The older I become the more I realize of that I have to work very hard to reproduce what I search: the instantaneous. The influence of the atmosphere on the things and the light scattered throughout.” — Claude Monet