Flowers for Monet

Last year, when I started blogging, I joyfully posted photos of the wave after wave of blossoms I revel in every spring. This year, I was deeply involved in a university course at the height of the flower season, and the blog receded into the background. But I was still going on walks, the flowers were still blooming, and I was still recording some of the more impressive displays. After seeing the flower-filled Monet exhibition this week, I went back to those pictures, thinking about how he would have painted them.

Monet and his fellow Impressionists scandalized the French art world by leaving the studio and going outside to paint what they found there. Their paintings were fleeting impressions of colour and light, bright, vibrant, and lacking detail. Critics said their work was just sketches, unfinished. “Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished than that seascape,” a reviewer wrote of an early Monet painting. But the public soon came around to the fresh new style, and it’s now accepted as just one of many ways artists portray the world. 

Here are some of the spring blossoms I would have liked Monet to have a go at:

Lilacs outside my window. A sea of purple and green. 

Poppies in a side yard. Bright pops of orange in a feathery field.

My tied-up delphiniums; I think he would have liked the vivid colours.

A fence laden with white clematis.

A front garden jam-packed with red and yellow tulips.

A white rhodo looks fresh and bright in its bed of green leaves.

The laburnum walk at VanDusen Botanical Garden is an obvious Monet painting.

A sweep of blue irises in my garden.

The beauty bush is a bouquet of pink above the boxwood hedge.

A little bunch of tulips strategically placed at a fence corner.

Bluebells are a carpet under a tree at VanDusen.

Mock orange outside my window.

The last of the big blue irises in my garden.

A magnolia tree dwarfs the front of this house.

Purple petunias in my garden planter.