Winter has arrived! The holiday season has begun. With it brings joy, gatherings with friends and family, holiday cheer, thankfulness. Yet the winter season and the holidays can magnify one’s aloneness. But why not choose to get quiet? To adopt the stillness, quietness, and beauty that nature brings? How glorious and revitalizing it can be!
Claude Monet’s painting, Magpie, revitalizes me. It gives me comfort and warmth as I soak in the beauty of this winter scene, the lone magpie appearing content in his aloneness…
My first impressions of this work? The whisper of freshly fallen snow. Blue shadows, cool light, cold, crisp air. Snow-covered tree limbs. The sun’s warmth. And one solitary bird perched on the gate … a magpie.
I feel beckoned to step into the composition, yet remain very aware I must keep my distance so as to not dis-turb the quiet of this moment. The scene is best appreciated when I observe from afar.
Magpie is one of Claude Monet’s best-known paintings depicting a snowy landscape. Monet was a leader in the French Impressionist movement in the third quarter of the 19th century; he and other Impressionist artists aimed to capture a fleeting moment. They sought to convey the visual impression made by a scene, par-ticularly the effect of light on color.
Monet used what is known as colored shadows to show the changing conditions of light and shadow in nature. He masterfully captured an ephemeral moment in time where, in the blink of an eye, the play of light and shadow change. In the process he succeeded in evoking within the observer the strong sense of being in this space.
For me the scene reminds me of those blistering winters at my college in Maine. Magpie transports me to the days when I walked across the snow-covered campus, with no one around, the only sound being that of the wind, and feeling totally at peace. To this day those moments remain fond memories.
What winter memories does Monet’s painting invoke in you? As you let yourself gaze at the snowy scene, can you feel the crisp air on your face and the faint warmth of sun on your skin? Do you hear the snow crunch under your feet?
And what about the lone magpie looking serene and content? How does this bird manage to survive and thrive on such a cold winter’s day?
I find this scene to be most comforting. Monet produced approximately one-hundred-forty snowy landscapes. He created these compositions by painting in the open air using natural light, and it shows. His shadows aren’t merely dark areas; they are accurate representations of what’s observed in nature. I feel it is this mastery of shadows and light through the use of color that creates that sense of immersion in Monet’s snowy scene. He and other Impressionists paved the way for presenting landscapes the observer can truly feel in a multi-sen-sory way.
Impressionism offers us another way of looking at the world, a way that focuses on the changing qualities of light and how these subtle shifts accentuate the passage of time. The techniques these artists created brought out the mood of a scene to evoke deep emotions within us.
Works like Magpie that appear simple but require nimble skills in observation, color use, and painting tech-niques reveal the true genius of an artist’s ability to present the world in a new light. Magpie awakens the senses and reminds us of how beautiful, transient, and sacred each moment in life really is.
