From Giverny, Monet could hear the guns of the first world war as he painted. He conceived his towering series of nearly abstract water lilies canvases as his response to the carnage. “Yesterday I resumed work,” he wrote in December 1914. “It’s the best way to avoid thinking of these sad times. All the same, I feel ashamed to think about my little researches into form and colour while so many people are suffering and dying for us.” Explains Dumas: “Monet saw painting almost as a war effort, his personal patriotic gesture.” From The Guardian, 15 Jan 2016, Flower power: the gardens that caused modern art to bloom.
I have quoted that whole paragraph as sometimes I have questioned the validity of my own art practice in these, our own times of political and social change, competing “facts”, the so-called post-truth era and the apparent rise of populism (though it has never not existed). I found the quote very affirming to read and it confirms my belief that art is my personal form of resistance and my way of asserting the values of care, beauty, nurture, vision for a peaceful future through a focus on gardens as a place of culture.
The article is particularly relevant to me now, too, in that it talks of the shadows that hang over the gardens in many of the works included in the show. My current shadows are on my liver and hanging over my future. In the immediate here and now I have a film to edit and gifts in my lifetime to make.
