Beautiful Giverny

by Carla Parris

Title

Beautiful Giverny

Artist

Carla Parris

Medium

Photograph - Digital Photograph

Description

BEAUTIFUL GIVERNY is an Impressionistic style altered, edited, textured, and enhanced digital photograph by Carla Parris.

French Impressionist painter Claude Monet found years of inspiration for his later paintings in the Japanese Gardens at his home in Giverny, near Vernon and about an hour outside Paris. The artist was a master gardener, and designed and implemented the gardens, working for years before ever turning to these beautiful scenes for the subject matter of his work.

The beautiful water lily pond in the Japanese Gardens at the artist's home at Giverny was my inspiration for this colorful digital painting.

This piece, in vivid pastels of aqua, pink, purple, chartreuse, and blue, began with an actual photograph taken when I had the pleasure of visiting Giverny in the late summer of 2013. The pond had pink and white water lilies. There were foreground pink flowers, echoed in the colors of this work. There were weeping willow trees in various spots around the pond, including on the left of this scene where there is a patch of lime green.

The morning before my visit to Giverny, I visited the L'Orangerie museum in the center of Paris where a collection of Monet's large original water lily canvases are displayed in a beautiful gallery designed by the artist. Two rooms flooded with wonderful indirect natural light have the canvases completely circling the space, with a single line of benches in the center where the visitor can leisurely enjoy the paintings. The gallery was actually designed by Claude Monet to house his impressive work. Appropriately, since the water lily pond is in Giverny's Japanese garden, the gallery had a minimalist, Asian feel to it. It was serene and invited lingering, contemplative enjoyment of the stunning paintings.

I had heard of Monet's home and gardens, and the l'Orangerie museum, since high school when I took four years of French. I had previously seen some of Monet's original paintings in other galleries, including the Musee d'Orsay and the High Museum in Atlanta. Accordingly, I honestly didn't expect to be as impressed, and truly overwhelmed, by these particular paintings as I was when I finally had the opportunity to visit both the L'Orangerie and Giverny. Sometimes travel experiences are above and beyond one's expectations. Both these visits were in that category.

Texture is courtesy of Melissa Gallo.

Uploaded

July 27th, 2014

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