Insert Something Clever Here

Everyone sets goals in their lives; some are left unachieved, and others are obtained with minor effort. Some people even set similar goals time after time, and they fail time after time, only to pick themselves back up, dust themselves off, and try just as hard for another goal comparable to the one that they failed to meet. I envy this tenacious attitude that is possessed by seemingly few people, and as I sit here on the sidelines I wonder if I’ll be able to quit being so easily discouraged by a minor bump in the road, and just be passionate enough about something to keep bouncing back.

Since he began his painting career after the pressure to paint from a religious basis was no longer prevalent, and since the church had previously been an important element of artistic creation, artists were now free to explore new avenues and express themselves without feeling compelled to use the symmetrical values that were associated with the religious art, and were free to creatively seek out their own methods of self expression. Monet was able to incorporate new ways of expressing himself and represent reality through the content and structure of his work.
Many artists of the same time period spent endless hours working in their studios to produce their paintings, but Monet wasn’t fond of being trapped inside. Instead, he preferred the natural lighting and shadows that were cast onto objects and surfaces, and he thought that being outside was perhaps the best way to go about getting that.

Monet painted in the style considered impressionism, and in my opinion this is proven mostly through his “Water Lily” series, which do a great job at showing the painter’s affinity for using nature as his muse. An artist’s ability to capture the quality of light and atmosphere out of doors is considered plein-air, and such quality is usually captured through painting. What impresses me the most about Monet is that he was steady at being an impressionist, since most painters of the time generally only stuck with a certain style of painting for a short period of time throughout their career, but Monet remained an impressionist throughout his career as a painter. I was particularly surprised to learn that the title impressionism gained its name from Monet’s painting entitled Impression, Sunrise, and they proceeded to go on and have multiple impressionist exhibitions. Impressionism didn’t even catch on at first, but through their relentless perseverance, its influence eventually spread throughout Europe in the late 1880s.

I really admire the fact that Monet painted everyday subjects, it really shows that he was able to see that beauty does exist in everything. I enjoy how his subject is usually some sort of a landscape, and how he paints it over and over again at different times of the day, to capture the different effects of the changing light from the sun. Monet has done many series paintings which to me express the painter’s fascination with the changing beauty of nature, that within just hours something can look completely different simply because the lighting has changed. My favorite of his series paintings would have to be the haystacks. Not too many people are able to see the beauty in a quaint haystack sitting in a field, but Monet manages to capture the beauty of them by painting them under different lighting conditions at different times of the day. He would wake up very early in the morning before dawn and paint on his first canvas for a half and hour, and in that time, the light is changed, so he would switch to the second canvas, and keep repeating this process every day. The way that the light shines on the haystack is different every time he goes to paint them, thus ensuring that each haystack painting differs from another.

Throughout my studying Monet, I have come to be more and more fascinated with him and his painting style. Although there are certain aspects that have been publicized about his personal life that I don’t necessarily deem appropriate, my interest in Monet and impressionism has peaked to a new level, and I intend on continuing my studies and researching more artists in the times to come.