Don't The Sunrise Look So Pretty

There are so few times that one can quote Little Feat lyrics and be thinking of French Impressionists, but this is one of them.
I saw two paintings from Monet's Rouen Cathedral series recently at the National Gallery of Art and I haven't been able to stop thinking about them. I purchased two postcards of the paintings and have them hung up in my office. This isn't new. I have had this feeling before--in the early 1990's saw a series he had painted in London, as well as the better known series of sunlight on haystacks that he painted at a Monet exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute and thought about it for a year afterwards. It is not the subject matter that holds my imagination--it is the sunlight. And the variations therein. The moment in time that is captured, just as it was.

I really think he is onto something that is very primal about the human perception of beauty as it relates to the outdoors. Somehow, the changing color with the changing time of day is very dramatic on a building face. The thing I find most captivating about these paintings is that it is something that I notice all the time when I am travelling. When I take the time to sit and watch things in a way that I cannot seem to manage at home. I can't deny that I am an inverterate people watcher. I am. I spend an awful lot of time on days off doing just that. It is the single greatest feature about the 1905 house we bought last year--the front porch and the world that it puts at our doorstep to watch. However, the changing of light over time is gorgeous to behold.

And while reproducions are evocative of the original work, they are a poor second best. The originals are three dimensional and emotional in a way that the photograph is not. Maybe it is the interplay of light on the surface of the paint itself that makes the difference. I have always enjoyed paintings that really lay it on thick, so it might be that it appeals to the love of texture that I am hard wired for.
Monet left 2000 paintings, a remarkable life's work, and almost all of it painted out of doors. Emphasizing sunlight. Magnifique!