The garden, 19 November 2024

It’s the same garden but it changes, it’s a living entity subject to the changing seasons, weather, and time of day. It was Clause Monet who showed us how the sunlight at the different times of the day changed our perception and our emotional response to the same environment, the paintings in the Série des Cathédrales de Rouen is a good example of this. And so with each changing season it’s the same garden but it's like a different garden, that’s how it appears, but it’s still the same garden, changing, growing, this place of peace and quiet in the city. 

After Monet

Two short videos of the effect of light on water. Both filmed at the Nitobe Memorial Gardens on the campus of UBC, July 11, 2010. Homage to the master, Claude Monet (1840 - 1926).

Mark Rothko at the MOMA

No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black) (1958) No. 3/ No. 13 (1949) No. 10 (1950) 

These photographs of paintings by Mark Rothko were taken at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City last year. Rothko's magnificent paintings are a favourite, a perennial favourite, with many people including myself. One of the great aesthetic experiences I've had, about twenty-five years ago, was at the Tate Gallery in London, when entering a room filled with (I believe it was nine) enormous Rothko paintings. This is when the aesthetic overlaps with the spiritual.

 

Claude Monet's "Water Lilies," also at the MOMA, is an equivalent aesthetic experience, but without the experience of the first two decades of the second half of the 20th Century that is found in Rothko's paintings at the Tate Gallery. This particular exhibition of Monet's paintings is an extraordinary lesson in reeducating our way of looking at nature, how light changes what we see, and how emotion is evoked by light.