Wednesday, May 9, 2012

paintings come to life






This past weekend our program took us to Giverny, a small town northwest of Paris in Normandy. Our goal: to see Monet's house and gardens, where he painted his famous Water Lilies and many other beautiful impressionist paintings. We first visited the Musee des Impressionnismes Giverny, where I expected lots of water color paintings that would cause my eyes to glaze over after a few minutes. Don't get me wrong, I love impressionist paintings however I'm not much of a museum person and tend to get blurry-eyed halfway through even the most impressive of exhibits. However this exhibit especially fascinated me, and I believe I found a new favorite artist: Maurice Denis. I was incredibly inspired by Denis' work. He mostly focused on spring scenes, my favorite season, and did a lot of biblical scenes set in contemporary settings. I won't bore you all with art talk, but I leave you all with a quote of his I found especially inspiring at the end of this post (he was a writer too). Then we were able to walk through Monet's house, see his studio with many original paintings on display (including one that my parents have a poster of in our laundry room at home), and walk through the beautiful gardens featuring the water lilies, droopy trees and bridge that he so often painted. There was even a romantic proposal on one of the bridges while we were there!



"There was no essential difference between the profane and the sacred,
the sensual and the spiritual,
human and divine love,
earthly and heavenly spring." -Maurice Denis

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