Last weekend I took a stroll towards the Tuileries and since I had already been to the Louvre (though there is still a lot I have yet to see in there since it is so large), I decided to go into the Orangerie museum. It is a building that was originally a sort of green house for the orange trees of the Louvre palace, so it is a much better lit museum than most of the previous ones I have been in.
This lighting is also very important for the Nymphéas room on the top floor of this museum. This room was originally designed to house the final grand art works of Claude Monet, the Nymphéas, or in English: Water lilies. It is an oval shaped room with one grand tableau on each side, to make a total of 4 works, depicting water lilies as the name suggests. However, the roundedness of the room, the special lighting, and the harmony of the art works have with one another allows you to feel like all four pieces are rather one complete piece, 360 degrees.
To virtually see this room, you can go to: http://www.musee-orangerie.fr/fr/article/visite-virtuelle-des-nympheas.
I am a fan of Monet. I even came up with a saying about him: when I take off my glasses, I say the world looks like a Monet painting. No sharp edges, everything a little blurred, the details fade, and the large perspective becomes clearer. I have myopia, almost -4.0 on both eyes. Possibly this is why I am so drawn to Monet.
Looking more into this, I found a paper that points out that there are many myopic artists in the impressionist movement (Polland, 2004). It is speculated that Monet was among them, but it is known that Monet had developed cataracts later in life, which might explain his tendencies to blur his color together, because he couldn’t see it so well, and yet his world was beautiful, as reflected by the Water Lilies.
It is said that art reflects life, and it is possible that I am only seeing this due to staring intensely for hours at these slides, but the stained neurons of the macaque amygdala that I work with also remind me of Monet’s work, both with the colors and unfortunately the lack of clarity with makes my life harder in counting and defining these cells. Non-the-less, they are beautiful to look at.
I also dabble a bit in art myself. I have not been finding enough time in college as much as I used to in middle and high school, but when I was interning in a transitional homeless shelter in Atlanta, called Gateway, I had about an hour where a therapeutic painting session was going on and I made an impromptu painting that reminds me slightly of the Water lilies work, though it looks at best as if painted by a 12-year-old Monet, and I was already a college freshmen.
References:
Polland, W. (2004). Myopic artists. Acta Ophthalmologica Scandinavica, 82(3p1), 325-326. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0420.2004.00252.x