Impressionism

If I'm choosing one painter of all the thousands that have left their mark, it's Monet. A propagator of the Impressionism fad in the 19th century in Paris, his paintings used to drive me nuts. As a child, I couldn't grasp this style. Why not fill in the blanks between the smudges? Make solid lines? Why make a painting that looks terrible up close?

Then I had the fortune to listen to Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune, a piece of French Impressionist music, while gazing at Monet paintings. And then magic happened.

Something about the blurred lines and the soft notes speaks to me. When I feel empty, lifeless, I always seem to return to this combination. The idea with Impressionism is that everything is dreamlike, watery. Nothing is as it seems.

Things are lucid in the world of Impressionism, and in the haze, reality sharpens.