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| The famous arch in the Upper Garden |
Usually I write a pithy commentary, but not today. I’ll write very little and allow the photos
to tell the real story. After all, Monet’s
Garden is not about writing, but about color and light and capturing ever-changing
images. You just think you’ve seen a
garden. The grounds of Monet’s hideaway
in Giverny will overpower you with the form and sheer immensity of color.
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| Upper garden to the left, lower garden to the right. |
The Garden is actually two gardens, the upper garden (The
Clos Normand), closer to the house, with overflowing rows and mounds of blossoming
color. Across the road (via underpass
walkway) is the lower garden (The Water Garden), a woody and bamboo paradise of
green, placid ponds strewn with lily pads, bridged with emerald arches
evocative of Japanese styles, and in the afternoons the wondrous croaking of
hundreds of frogs. It was here that
Monet painted the famous (and numerous) water lily studies.
Why so many? It takes
a little fuzzy explaining, rather like explaining why you swooned over a brassy
red head yesterday, but today your heart belongs to a timid brunette.
That’s not as far fetched a metaphor as you’d imagine. Lighting was the thing in Monet’s (and the
impressionists’) mind. Study a tree, for
example. Green, right? Well, yes, as well as some black and brown,
even among the foliage. As the sun
passes, you glance back and suddenly see whites and yellows and four shades of
green. But, it’s a just green freaking
tree! Different times, different
lighting, different viewpoints.
Intuitively we recognize this. Hollywood developed an industry around
employing light and perspective to turn ordinary people into glamorous stars of
the galaxy.
As has been said many times, Impressionism’s lifeblood is
capturing an impression, a glimpse, a mood.
Light and gray shadows decorate a white house, yet even those grays and
their shapes change in the rising and fading light of day.
As a matter of fact, Monet’s observations led him to assert
that colors change every seven minutes.
With his water lilies, he tried to capture the changes, the impressions
of the light as the sun swept across the sky, and the clouds danced between
heaven and earth. A mammoth task and one
that led him to construct a huge ‘water lily’ studio and produce a prodigious
array of massive canvases.
Want to know more about the basics, including opening hours
(and months) for the garden, as well as how to get to this fabulous spot that
should be in every art lover’s bucket of paint?
What is not said is that if you’re an artist (starving and
talent optional), tickets are available that let you have the garden to
yourself after 6:00 p.m., when the curators drive the riff-raff out and leave
the immense gardens to budding Monets until the witching hour of 8 p.m.. We had a group of eight and other than
another group of similar size, we painted alone, often not within sight of one
another.
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| A quiet respite in the upper garden, The Clos Normand |
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