Essay/Term paper: Waterlillies

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Miscellaneous

Art analysis of Water Lilies





Have you ever looked at a pond and squinted your eyes? Well if you have you would know exactly how Claude Monet felt. Around the time of this painting Monet was loosing his eyesight. It seems to me that this painting was actually meant to be realistic, Monet just painted what he saw, how he saw it. It"s kind of weird how he achieved this fuzzy look, he doesn't use any real hard edges on any of the forms, but they aren't really faded that much either, It could just be the use of alike colors (in this case green and blue) which make the edges of the lilies fade into the edge of the water.

One thing I can"t figure out is how this painting is balanced so well. The concept of putting all the lilies on the right side would seem to me to weigh that side down. Then once again the alike colors come into play and they just seem to fade into each other when you stand back and look at it as a whole. Then also the flowers at the bottom of the painting are the brightest part of it and since they are in the middle they just even it out by being the most attentive part.

When I first saw this painting I didn"t really see a feeling that Monet was trying to convey. Then I learned that he was loosing his eyesight and went back to look once more. The second time I had ever seen it it gave me the message that as you get older things start to fall apart and get fuzzy. It also seems to be the same message in all the paintings after that , because they seem to get weirder and more abstract. Like he cant even control what's going on in his own life.

He also used the perfect medium for my interpretation of his artwork. Paint is the easiest medium that I know of to make a fuzzy picture with, it"s actually hard to make a well defined line with it. Basically the point I want to make is that this painting isn"t really as abstract as most people think it is, as I said before, he just paints what he sees, how he sees it.