From the great painter Claude Monet:
“I tried to do the impossible – to paint the light itself.”
“Paint what you really see, not what you think you ought to see.”
“All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.”
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From the wonderful poet May Sarton:
Light
For Monet
Poets, too, are crazed by light,
How to capture its changes,
How to be accurate in seizing
What has been caught by the eye
In an instant’s flash –
Light through a petal,
Iridescence of clouds before sunrise.
They, too, are haunted by the need
To hold the fleeting still
In a design –
That vermilion under the haystack,
Struck at sunset,
Melting into the golden air
Yet perfectly defined,
An illuminated transience.
Today my house is lost in milk,
The milky veils of a blizzard.
The trees have turned pale.
There are no shadows,
That is the problem – no shadows
At all.
It is harder to see what one sees
Than anyone knows.
Monet knew, spent a lifetime
Trying to undazzle the light
And pin it down.
~ May Sarton ~
From: Letters from Maine: New Poems, 1984
Art by Claude Monet:
“Wheatstacks (End of Summer)”
and
“Landscape Around Honfleur, Snow”
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