Monet Couldn't be Fun
The first week of summer is a fabulous thing for a child. The stress of the
school year is over and every day has the potential for fun. This year the
weather turned warm the instant school came to an end, and in the case of my
kids,
they are lucky enough to have a Mom ready and willing to plan and fund an
exciting activity almost every day.
The boys have been out of school for just a week and have already taken a trip to an amusement park, went boating, cooled off at the movies, as well as bowling, ice skating and golfing.
So with that as a bit of background, when Mom suggested, “Why don’t we go see the new Monet exhibit up in San Francisco,” the reaction was, shall we say, “muted.”
The idea of looking at a bunch of paintings sounded painful to my boys. Paintings don’t move, you have to be quiet, there’s little exercise and couldn’t we just look at the same pictures on the Internet?
The first words of protest were met with a sharp “tough, you are going.” I think they thought about complaining, but remembering what they had already done and what was on tap in days ahead, and they thought better of it.
With temperatures approaching 100 degrees, we headed to the city’s Legion of Honor to see the exhibit. Upon entering the boys noticed they could rent a headset to guide them through the exhibit. While they didn’t look exactly like an IPOD, clearly they would provide some relief to the coming boredom they would suffer. Both boys rented a headset only to learn later that the headphones were filled with lots of boring talk.
I have to admit that after seeing Monet’s paintings in locales around the world and after visiting his house in Giverny, I wasn’t expecting too much myself. I was wrong. Seeing a painting isn’t something you check off a list and file into memory, it’s more of an experience. And this exhibit was a collection from many museums and private collections I had never seen as well as a few I had.
I listened to some of the boring talk on the headphones, once the boys tired of them, and have to admit that much of the art experts’ analyses is lost on me. I guess we each have our own way of enjoying a painting. I love to see how much color impressionists use, frequently to create a final product that looks grey. I love to see the texture of the paint, which gives the paintings a three-dimensional feel. I love to see a moment captured in time not as a photograph might capture it, but as the painter felt it. Nothing beats seeing it in person and I was even surprised that the $50 prints available for sale in the store didn’t even come close to capturing the vibrance of the originals.
I invited
Scottie over to look at a winter landscape. The picture seemed to have been
painted entirely with two colors: white and gray. We began just inches from the
canvass looking at how the paint was applied and, for example, that a simple
stroke was designed to represent a tree. Scott agreed that it was hard to tell
exactly what we were looking at. Then we turned our backs to the painting and
walked back about 5 yards and looked at the painting again. Scott’s eyes opened
wide and his mouth dropped open and evolved into a smile. The painting had just
magically transformed itself from a bunch of paint into a winter scene. The look
on his face was priceless.
We went on to explore the rest of the museum and both boys enjoyed the discovery that comes with art. After they were warmed up they both professed confidence in their opinions that one painting was gorgeous while another was crap. Scott seemed to like the paintings that provided photographic realism into a time well before photographs existed. Kevin seemed more inspired by the impressionist offering, with the exception of one Picasso that we all agreed stunk.
As we drove home, we made plans to visit some of the other San Francisco Museums over the course of the summer. Scott has spent hours at the kitchen table carefully working on his Monet coloring book. He is carefully recreating the Masters’ work with a more modern 21st century medium – colored markers.
June 22, 2006
© Greg Harris, 2006