THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, August 25, 1995 TAG: 9508250662
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
You may wish to drop by the Chrysler Museum this weekend to see ``Water Lilies,'' fresh as the day it was painted in 1905 by Claude Monet in his garden in France.
As I've done. Twice.
Having had difficulty in college with art appreciation as well as math, French, physics, psych, sociology, phys. ed., and cafeteria, I took along a gifted Old Dominion University student.
``Tell me, in one word, what it means,'' I asked my guide.
She pondered, eyeing it.
``Serene,'' she said.
Nearby, a woman in her early middle ages, reflected on it.
``Cool,'' she said. ``As if I had just come from a sweltering street in Norfolk into a quiet retreat.''
A reader from Chesapeake mulled it over.
``Opalescent,'' she said.
As if she could dip her hand in the limpid waters of the pond on canvas.
In the gallery that first day, my guide noted that Monet, late in life, focused on water lilies in his garden 50 miles northwest of Paris. He was consumed with painting water lilies from every angle and aspect.
At first, he entered details - a little humpbacked bridge, a low swinging bough, the pond's green banks.
Then Monet began to refine the scene, to reduce it to essences, to the point of becoming nearly abstract, the guide said.
``So how do you see it?'' she asked.``Buoyancy,'' I said, ``now that you've instructed me.
``From afar my eyes turn everything impressionistic, to just colors - pink, pale orange, lavender - blending in light summer fabric, a person approaching.''
``I shouldn't have asked,'' she said.
The display through Sept. 3 of the single Monet, on loan from an anonymous couple, is sponsored by the Museum's Masterpiece Society. Attendance already has doubled over that of last August.
Sunday, you may hear experts. At 2 p.m. the museum's director of education, Ann Dearsley-Vernon, will give a gallery tour of the works of many artists featuring flowers found in Monet's garden on the river Seine.
At 3 p.m. in the Museum's theater, landscape architect Kathleen Redfern, who worked in the garden at Giverny in the summers of 1991, 1992 and 1995, will offer glimpses of scenes that inspired Monet. The tour and lecture will be free and open to the public.
A second, closer look brings home the sense of Monet opening a wide vista of pink, white and lavender splotches floating on an unbounded plain that fills the canvas to overflowing as if the waters would flow into the Huber Court and outward to join the headwaters of the Hague.
For me, it merits a third visit to fix the scene in the mind's eye. ILLUSTRATION: Claude Monet's 1905 masterpiece of impressionism, ``Water
Lilies,'' is being lent by an anonymous couple to the Chrysler
Museum in Norfolk through Sept. 3.
by CNB