Today I wanted to share with you an art piece by one of my favorite artist of all time, Claude Monet. Curiously, even if I've spent three years studying Art History at university, I never saw this painting. I actually stumbled upon it while scrolling down on Tumblr. Isn't it funny? Studying for years and finding your favorite painting of one of the artist you admire the most on Tumblr? Sometimes events surprise me, and since it feels like I wasn't meant to study this canvas, that it wasn't my destiny to have a teacher telling me everything about it, I decided to tell you about "Mill at Limetz" with an eye different of the one of the art historian that I am. It will just be the eye of a girl who stumbled upon a painting that just pleased her, captivated her, and finally moved her. So I'm not going to do what we call in a barbarous way an "eksphrasis", here I just want to declare my love to this painting, and to tell you all of its reasons, but by keeping quite the historian in my head to let talk the mesmerized girl in my heart.
I was back at home, sitting in the living room, trying to find inspiration for my next article on Tumblr when I saw the picture of this painting. Of course I did recognize Monet, my eyes have been trained for that kind of job, but I had never saw this canvas before. And so in a second I became obsessed with it. I needed to find the title, to find other pictures, details, I needed to learn more about it. Useless to say that I spent my whole evening on Google trying to find this one in an ocean of Monet paintings. But finally, when I started to desperate of finding it one day, it appeared on the screen. "Moulin de Limetz", as his original title. Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm, 1888. But who really cares about that except from the art historians? When you face a master piece sometimes you don't want to know too much about it, too afraid that something will kill the magic, kill the feelings, and so it will just be one more paintings in your memory, but not anymore that special one. I guess it is the colors. Green, purple and pink, this audacious but mesmerizing mix between the shades that just lead to one of the most beautiful painting of this period of time. We are not sure of what we see, there are so many color stains, the tree hides the landscape, but we can catch sight of the watermill, in a quite place, surely located in the French country side, around Paris. I just watched that canvas and stop myself for asking all of the questions coming to my mouth. It is just beautiful, poetry on a canvas. We can almost feel the wind in the leaves, hear the water falling of the mill, the river's sound, be blinded by this Summer sun. Monet is poetry, we sure know that, but this painting seems different. It has to stay untouched, uncommented, it has just to be watched, and we just have to cry or to smile while watching it, because isn't it the goal of art? Making us feel the beauty? So stay quite, stare and feel. This is certainly what Monet would have want us to do, as every poet does.
xo
Amy
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