Monet's Method
You’ve definely seen Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies”—these paintings are among the most recognized art pieces in the world. Even if you’ve not pondered them somewhere like the Art Institute of Chicago, they’ve appeared to you on a coffee mug somewhere.
Did you know that Monet created them as a series of 250 different paintings? He returned to the subject again and again over the course of 30 years!
When I heard that, I wondered how anyone does any one thing for 30 years. After spending time in front of these paintings, though, I discovered an answer: Monet wasn’t painting water lilies—he was painting the sky.
A few years back, the fam spent the better part of a week in Giverny, France, where Monet lived. It’s a quaint little town that gets flooded by a tide of tourists from late morning through the afternoon. The latter part of the day, though, fills with slanted light and is quiet enough to hear a lazy breeze.
In Giverny, you can walk around Monet’s pond and see the Japanese bridge and the weeping willows that appear in early versions of his water lily series. Over the years as he painted, he let go of the need to orient the viewer to a setting or landscape and just played with the surface of the water, which captured the world like a living mirror.
At first glance, the actual lilies on the canvas provide a focal point for the eye on a field of impressionistic color. Then, the longer you gaze at these works, you notice the dynamic that draws us to them over and over again: the luminosity of the sky glowing between and beyond the lilies. Monet mastered—and then handed on to us—a method to see the beauty of the thing in front of us as a door to what’s beyond. The cupped crimson petals and dotted yellow stamens floating in the water don’t distract us from the sky—they give us a foothold in it; and the reflection of the cobalt sky, curling with pink and purple clouds, only gives the lilies more dignity.
No one would buy a painting of clouds. But a painting of water lilies that reveals transcendent light dancing through the sky? That work sold for $65.5 million last week.
I wrote about Monet’s “Water Lilies” in a letter to a high school teacher who just received a tough cancer diagnosis. He is a faithful man who taught chemistry with a quirky sense of humor. Looking back, I can see that he was one of those figures who, without giving any explicit advice, helped me navigate adolescence. Between and beyond his corny jokes I could see his steady, trustworthy example.
Because my wife is a Monet superfan, we have stationery printed with the “Water Lilies,” so that’s what I wrote to him with. My prayer for him was that this season of life would present him with momentary beauty that also reflected the heavenly, glowing light rippling around us.
Advent is around the corner, folks, and I’m pretty excited to see the little prayer booklets I wrote appearing out in the wild. Ave asked me to write these daily devotionals, and (thanks to my editor) they offer a new twist that you’ve never seen before in a seasonal resource. Each day’s reflection and prayer is based on a lyric from a well-known Advent or Christmas hymn.
The booklet is titled Let Heaven and Nature Sing, and we’ve even included QR codes at the bottom of each page to link you to a playlist where you can hear different versions of each song. The goal is to help you carry a tune through each day that will keep your heart anchored to an insight and prayer as you prepare for Christmas.
I gotta tell ya—these were so much fun to write. I got to pick music that ranged from Aaron Neville to Julie Andrews to Chanticleer to John Denver to Sufjan Stevens to Matt Maher to Ella Fitzgerald to the Irish Tenors to the Blind Boys of Alabama. Here's a sampling of some of the songs I got to play with:
I’m told these booklets are close to selling out, so if you want to pray along with me this year, be sure to order ASAP (they’re just $2.75 each—find them at AveMariaPress.com or on Amazon). But if you don’t have the booklet, never fear: I’ll be sending out this newsletter each week with a selected song and a reflection to use in prayer. Those will start arriving next Sunday with the first week of Advent and continue through Christmas to the Baptism of the Lord. Looking forward to praying with you through this season!
If you know someone you’d like to pray with, pass along this newsletter—we’ll all sing our way through Christmas this year.