Water Lily Pond 1917

Claude Monet made this painting, ‘Water Lily Pond,’ sometime in his life, with oil on canvas. He’s laying down dashes of colour, building the image through this kind of process of addition. It’s not about drawing lines so much as building up form with colour. Look at the surface of the water. It's alive with texture, a mosaic of strokes that suggest movement, reflection, and the sheer physicality of water. You can see the way the paint sits on the canvas; it's not trying to hide itself or create an illusion. It's just there, present, like the water and the lily pads themselves. Think about the later work of someone like Joan Mitchell, the same all-over approach to painting, where the surface is activated from edge to edge, and meaning is found in the gesture, the mark, and the colour. For Monet, like Mitchell, painting wasn’t about capturing a scene but about capturing an experience.