#105: Life is about feeling alive, not looking perfect.

The Impressionists, shifting perspective, and finding beauty in the mundane.

Nov 09, 2024

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“This is not the Smithsonian, sir, this is the National Gallery of Art.”

The sharp-tongued docent spread her hands out on the gallery map, and leaned menacingly towards the man, affronted.

Standing behind him in line, I was silently shouting, “Abort, dude, abort. She’s going to eat you for breakfast!” But he was not reading the room. Ignoring her body language, he doubled down. “Well, what’s the difference?”

Uh, geez.

“Andrew Mellon founded this museum, it stands alone from its neighbors here on the Washington Mall, and...”

I could witness a blood bath a few rooms away in the Old Masters’ paintings. I did not need to see a live-action dismemberment in the National Gallery entrance hall. Trying to save this guy’s life and move on with mine, I cut in, “Hi, so sorry to interrupt, but can you please tell me the direction of the special Impressionist exhibit?”

“Oh, that’s what I’m looking for too!” He cluelessly said.

“Upstairs and to the left.” She looked at me, rolling her eyes in his direction.

I sprinted away, hoping he’d follow.

I ascended Andrew Mellon’s marble clad stairway and walked down the second floor’s echoey stone hallway.

(Thank you, 19th century robber baron, using a sackful of your pillaged money to create such a thing of beauty!)

I met the queue in the atrium, scanned the QR code on the poster, and read the exhibit pre-brief on my phone. As I waited my turn with the other art nerds, I absentmindedly fingered the velvet ropes corralling us.

The exhibit — Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment — takes us back to when the Impressionists were just getting started. Unlike today, when Monet’s lily pads are printed on throw pillows and phone cases, initially the Impressionists were mocked. Because the powers that be were still valuing the realism, perfection, and high ideals of picture perfect images in the style of academicism. Not only did the paintings border on photographic, they were also grand scenes of morality, frugality, how a toga was properly draped.

The Death of Socrates, Jacques Louis David (French, Paris 1748–1825 Brussels), Oil on canvas — *The Death of Socrates* by Jacques Louis David — dark, serious, life-like in the most perfect way.

But the Impressionists couldn’t help but try something different.

They painted what they saw in front of them — not biblical figures or lauded leaders from times passed.
They sought to evoke a feeling (an impression, if you will) in their paintings by using choppy brush strokes, luminous colors, and white-primed canvases.
Their art reflected modern times — a post-war life that the academic painters of the day appeared oblivious to.

The Impressionists were dedicated to the here and now. The experience of today, rather than an idealized re-telling of the past. They weren’t trying to escape their lived reality, paint over it, or trade it in for the good old days. They wanted to capture the present moment’s essence just as it was.

And let the imperfect, everyday, fleeting nature of it be the beauty of it.

From low on a hillside, we look up at a light-skinned woman and boy standing in tall grass against a sunny blue sky in this vertical painting. The woman stands at the center of the composition, and the moss-green parasol she holds over her head almost brushes the top edge of the canvas. Her body faces our left but she turns her head to look at us. Her long dress is painted largely with strokes of pale blue and gray with a few touches of yellow. Her voluminous skirts swirl around her legs to our left. She holds the parasol with both hands, and her brown hair is covered with a hat. Long strokes of white paint across her face suggest a veil fluttering in the breeze. The tall grass she stands in is dotted with buttercup yellow and plum purple, and she casts a long diagonal shadow along the grass toward us. The young boy seems to stand on the other side of the hill, since the grass and flowers comes up to his waist. He wears a white jacket and pale yellow straw hat. His arms are by his sides, and he seems to look off into the distance to our left. A sunny blue sky behind the people is dotted with bright blue clouds. The painting is created with loose brushstrokes throughout, and they are especially choppy in the clouds. The artist signed and dated the painting in royal-blue letters at the lower right: “Claude Monet 75.” — *Woman with a Parasol* by Claude Monet — light, bright, blurry, life-like in the way that it feels rather than how it looks.

Funnily enough, the critics of the time ridiculed the Impressionists for prioritizing beauty over message.

Unless each painting was banging you over the head with a parable of higher virtue, the haters didn’t see it’s worth.

They missed the profound message I see in an Impressionist painting — perfection is not necessary for beauty. In fact, you can find beauty anywhere. (Especially if you squint ;).

This has been my experience crawling out of my grief pit and stumbling into aliveness. We think life should look a certain way… and so we go on striving to make every detail perfect — retirement savings account, LinkedIn profile, clean house, car, kids — just like the academic painters’ brush strokes. Not a hair out of place.

But in doing so, we can accidentally suck the juice out of life. We forget to enjoy the experience of it while we are busy perfecting it.

Even if your life doesn’t look like a gorgeously rendered biblical parable or partially clad Greek god, even if it just looks like a bustling city block, a hazy sunrise, or lily pads, there is beauty in it. Maybe even more beauty, because it is real and therefore can be felt.

Because what is life without feeling? What is life without aliveness?

A painting of a sunrise over the water, with small boats in the foreground. — *Impression, Sunrise* by Claude Monet.

You might be wondering, why are we taking life advice from renegade artists?

Yes, stereotypically artists are flaky and don’t care if their parents hate them or their wife and children starve. They’re not embarrassed by their own kooky ideas or empty bank accounts. They're not trying to get their kid into university, the roof fixed, the car keys away from their aging parents.

But the Impressionists invite us to see that beauty is available to all of us, at any time. We get to define beauty for ourselves, rather than always striving for some ideal to which we can only fall short.

Even in the late 1800s, people were feeling the squeeze of perfectionism, standardization, robotization that made it harder to enjoy the here and now.

But the here and now is the only thing that can be enjoyed.

So let’s look for more reasons to enjoy it, rather than more reasons to judge it.

Finding the beauty,

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Arpit

Nov 9

Beautiful post, Sue. Another thing that the impressionists did uniquely, and that comes from being in the moment, was observe the colour/temperature of light - how say blue in shade was so different in the sun. The under layers would reflect this. It was so counterintuitive- a bright blue sky having an under layer (they had many actually) of bright orange to reflect the warmth of the blue. Ingenious I say!

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1 reply by Sue Deagle

Suzy West

Love how you tied your message to impressionist art. The idea of being in the moment was the life of the creator artist, being in your imagination. I will admit to spending a solid minute pondering the Woman with a Parasol. Gosh that painting draws me in.

Near me there is a sculpture garden called Grounds for Sculpture. There is a restaurant next to the recreation of Monet’s Lily Pond. I’ve sat on the patio and felt like I was in the painting - divine!

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