Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Claude Monet

Claude Monet was an artist during the Industrial Revolution. The paintings that he painted were called Impressionism. Claude Monet was a french painter. Monet painted mainly landscape pieces. One of his most famous pieces is "water lilies." He painted many scenes of the water lilies, close ups and far away scenes. His style of painting was a blurred brush stroke. His brush strokes were long and mixed together. Even thought the colors were mixed together and the brush strokes were blurry it was very clear to see what he was painting. Which most of the time was landscape, sometimes he would add people into his art. When he did paint people he did not put a lot of detail into the faces. The main detail was either in the clothes or the landscape around them.

One of Monet's paintings Impression: Sunrise influenced the name for the new movement of Impressionism in the 1800's. Monet's art was disliked in his early stages. But then he grew in popularity and his artwork began to sell in the 1880's. He was the first Impressionist who was known around the world, he made it all the way to the United States. One of his most famous series was at his home in Giverny, where he painted his Japanese style garden. He painted his most famous series "Water Lilies" and also painted in Giverny until he died. Monet liked to capture the wind, light, sun and the present moment in his paintings.

In 1890 he started painting in series where he would do the same painting but with different lighting and different atmosphere in each one. Monet exhibited many art pieces. He stuck with the art that he enjoyed through out the years and kept the Impressionist look. He was one of the only Impressionist artist who stayed with that form of art.

This website has many pictures of his and a great summary where I got most of my information from. http://wwar.com/masters/m/monet-claude.html

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Yep, Monet was a great talent and a visionary, in more ways than one...

Interesting fact: In 1923 Claude Monet had eye surgery to remove cataracts. These cataracts had affected Monet’s work, causing a reddish tone in many of his paintings.

After this surgery Monet believed he was able to see ultraviolet wavelengths normally filtered by the lens of the eye! Lol!

Some believe this extraordinary vision was responsible for the striking presentation of color demonstrated in his later works. See:

http://www.free-art-images.com/claude_monet