The Water Lilies
September 28, 2024 at 02:52AMIn this reflective essay for Orion Magazine, Katrina Vandenberg writes about aging, cataracts, and her mother’s burst of creativity later in life, alongside insights on art, Claude Monet’s water lilies, and the process of creating beauty in a time of suffering.
[P]lenty of people love to hate Monet’s water lilies, finding them pretty and passé, not to mention too much with us on calendars, T-shirts, and museum shop goods of all kinds. Others find the work in itself boring, but believe it acquires a new level of depth once they learn the murals were created within the context of bloody war and grief, their beauty heightened when set against a backdrop of suffering.
I don’t know anything less boring than a water lily, or less mysterious than watching water move as clouds shift and make balloon animals in the sky. And suffering doesn’t validate beauty any more than beauty validates suffering. Their coexistence simply is. The question becomes, Once you know that beauty and suffering often exist side by side, what do you do? I understand how startling it can seem, when you notice them together in the same way Monet put complementary colors next to each other (blue waves and orange boats, blood-red poppies and green grasses) so each makes the other more vivid.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/27/the-water-lilies/
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