The painter provides lessons for modern times. Or, when you think YOU'VE had a bad day...It’s been said that flowers grow out of darkness. So it is with people who choose to convert an adversity into a benefit. Beethoven for example, was plagued with deafness yet he continued to write symphonies. And Claude Monet, the French landscape painter, developed cataracts in both eyes and became nearly blind. Still, he kept painting, dabbing with small brush strokes, and helped established impressionism.
Monet was born in Paris on November 14, 1840. He was best known for his paintings of flowers and sweeping garden scenes. His underlying passion was to show how light and atmosphere changed by the hour or the season. He often painted the same object at different times of day or year. In fact, by his 83rd birthday, he had finished 22 giant paintings of water lilies.
In 1883, Monet moved to Giverny, a village along the Seine, and fell in love with the garden setting. "My garden," he said, "is my most beautiful masterpiece." Was the guy eccentric? Perhaps. Every morning, a gardener would boat around the pond next to Monet's house, carefully cleaning water lilies that had collected soot from passing trains. The master insisted that the water lilies would be pristine for the master painter.
By 1912, cataracts had formed in both of Monet’s eyes. At the peak of his career, it was a severe blow. Yet he pushed himself, painting with bolder strokes on larger canvases. One painting was nine feet tall and in order to paint all of it outside, Monet, who said he only painted what he could see, had a trench dug in the garden so the canvas could be raised or lowered by pulleys to the height he required.
Monet never gave up, saying. "It's on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly."
More Monet-isms
"Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love."
"I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers."
"I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers."
"Everything I have earned has gone into these gardens."
"Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment."
