The Truth of Nature

Now that I'm retired, I've made a pact with myself that if I see something that looks interesting that's going to happen somewhere, I'm going to explore and check it out. I don't have specific examples, but when I was working, more than once I was disappointed because there was something that looked interesting to me that I was unable to attend because I was working. I cannot even tell you when I heard about the Denver Art Museum (DAM) "Monet - The Truth of Nature" exhibit, but I knew that it looked interesting enough that I wanted to see it. 

Had I been working, it would have been tough to attend, because the exhibit runs from October of this year until February of next year. With that time frame, the only way I would have been able to attend would have been during Christmas vacation and there's enough other stuff going on at that time. But, because I have extra free time now, I decided to make a road trip out of it and come in the middle of October figuring that the weather would probably be the best of the time frame. Well, that's another story altogether.

As a disclaimer, I wouldn't call myself a Monet devotee.  I enjoy artwork for art's sake. I just found this exhibit interesting because it would be a very large collection of paintings by a particular artist that was supposed to show a well rounded collection of his work. I would have been just as excited about attending this exhibit had it been Picasso, or Van Gogh. I was looking forward to seeing the art, not necessarily the artist.

The artwork was arranged over two floors of the DAM museum annex with scheduled entries every 15 minutes. When it came close to my time, I queued up and waited for them to let us in to the exhibit. As we entered, we were given headset devices that we could listen to at our leisure that gave much more in detail information about different paintings as we walked around the two floors of the gallery. The nice thing about this was it kept people fairly quiet and it was also set up on two levels, one for adults and one for kids. I listened to one of the kids level portions and that was enough for me, but I could see where it would keep younger audience members engaged in the exhibit.

Most of the artwork was arranged chronologically, so I got to see how his art progressed throughout the years. The three paintings that I have posted here I found the most interesting mainly because of the information I had been given by my headset during the time I was looking at the particular paintings.

The first painting was taken on many of his excursions down to the southern coast of France. He loved painting the people and the beach scenes. What I found the most interesting of this particular paintings, was that they were able to discern that most of his work during this particular period, was actually painted right down at the beach and not in his art studio. He did not sketch the scene, then go back and paint the scene from memory, opting rather to paint right there. They know this because of careful analysis of the painting reveals small grains of sand in the paint that had been blown about with the breeze along the beach.

The second photo shows a waterfront scene painted in Amsterdam. Analysis of this basically proves that he painted this while sitting in a boat because it's the only spot where one could get that perspective of the scene. That's some serious dedication to sit there for hours, possibly days in a boat to get the scene the way he wanted it portrayed.

Quite possibly the most interesting painting to me was the third shot here, showing the Seine River in Paris almost frozen over during the winter of 1879. Because Monet was actively painting during this entire period, he captured the weather of the era as well. This is a time of a mini ice age in Europe and meteorologists actually use his paintings to get a sense of what the weather and climate were like in this area during this period because of his attention to details.

All in all, I enjoyed my time at the DAM and was very glad that I was able to view this collection of Monet paintings. I hope you enjoyed some of these samples of his work. If you'd like to see one other painting, there's another example of his work in this blog entry about halfway down.