Monet's Water Lilies . . . A Birthday Celebration

• Laurel's Corner

Thursday was my daughter's 30th birthday and one of the ways of celebrating it was to see the new exhibit at the MOMA in New York, as that is where she is living, and she was teaching a class there that night. There were 25 of us in the room with 7 paintings by Claude Monet, the French impressionist who would devote years of layering of color to  flowing passages of cloud reflections and in the case of this painting, a a tranquil surface punctuated by what looked like orange lilies.

My daughter Haley had us all stand about two feed from the painting and look at the small part of the painting that was directly before our eyes, and simply notice what occurred. My small part of the painting was so intricate in the pattern of colors that immediate I started analyzing it, and asking myself, "How did he do that?" Then she asked us to be aware of what the artist had devoted to the painting, and I thought of the moments and days Monet must have spend in some of the less joyful states, the peaks and valleys of the creative process. I felt a wave of love coming out of the painting to me, and to all of us from whom he painted. Then i felt a liquid warmth in my chest and a love for him. It was a warm swirling kind of love and one that definitely pulsated in my body.  The room was quiet. A reverent silence. A collective resonance in which one emotion of awe seems to height the next.

When you go to a museum, see art in daily life, or create yourself, do you feel at 1? Can you imagine Monet painting Water Lilies, and what brain states he might have been in?

There was something about being with my daughter, her boyfriend, a colleague of mind and the others in the class, right there with 7 works of Monet on a Thursday evening just before Halloween, celebrating Haley's birthday and feeling more than gratitude, peace . . .