I love how indirect it is; the model is outside while the painter is inside and we are seeing her through the window. The intense red colour breaks the monotony of whites and greys. In a winter fairytale a ripe, blooming carnation.
The trees and the snow outside are captured in patches of colour, in a typical Impressionist manner. Everything is very soft and vague. Camille must have been walking around in the garden while Monet was sitting inside, and she must have glanced for a mere moment towards the house and yet, in this painting, she seems almost frozen in time. Almost ghost-like is her pale face, here for a moment and disappearing quickly, like a vision from a dream. Camille was only twenty-one years old when this was painted, but a decade later she would be dead.
January passes. Winter passes. The snow eventually melts and the spring comes. Everything passes…. Claude Monet, Irises, During the time of the first world war Monet kept returning to the motif of irises and painted around thirty paintings, or portraits I should say, of them. Each of these paintings is very simple in terms of compositional but instead captures the vibrancy of the irises in various different moods and shades of purple and blue.
This portrait of the irises above is perhaps my favourite, or at least it is my favourite at the moment, because of its intense blueness. I just cannot separate my eyes from it! The vibrancy and the depth of that blue! Oh to be a little butterfly and fly into that nocturnal blueness and linger there on and on, listening to its sweet music and inhaling the fragrance of the spring night.
There are only five irises in the painting, painted in warm purple and yellow, and yet the entire painting is screaming with the colour of the iris. It is as if the blueness of the petals had spillt itself, like a bottle of ink, all over the garden. There is no boundary anymore between the flowers and the garden, the colours of the petals are spilling everywhere and posessing everything. This deep shade of blue gives the painting a mystical, almost dream-like mood, and the irises, tall and independant, each blossom growing on its own sturdy stem, are laughing and shining in that blueness like the stars.
