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.