Dear reader, it’s good to see you here again! I’ve returned from my hiatus and will be back to publishing again, probably on a less frequent schedule than before. I’m keen to produce more considered work rather than stick to a somewhat arbitrary weekly deadline. I hope you’ll bear with me whilst I figure out something that works a bit better for me.
Today’s poem was inspired by a trip I made in August to the Chishu Art Museum in Naoshima Island, Japan. The museum exhibits work from just three artists — Walter de Maria, James Turrell, and Claude Monet — with the museum’s spaces being specifically designed around each artist’s work1. The museum itself was designed by Tadao Ando, a renowned Japanese architect.
I have long been a fan of James Turrell’s work since encountering it serendipitously whilst holidaying with my family in southern Spain in 2011. So I was looking forward to seeing his work on Naoshima.
It was the Monet paintings which really took me aback, however.
Much of this had to do with the presentation of the work: five canvases are hung in a white room, tiled with cubes of white marble, which looks somewhat similar to the tiles used to make a mosaic. Before entering the room one is required to remove one’s shoes and don a pair of slippers, presumably to maintain a level of silence in the gallery. One then enters a kind of triangular anteroom with polished grey concrete walls, quite dimly lit. A bench runs along the wall opposite to the entrance. To one’s left is a wide rectangular archway into the main room which contains the paintings; one’s first encounter with Monet’s Water Lillies is through this archway, which forms a kind of second frame around the largest and most imposing of the paintings, the four-meter-wide Water Lily Pond split across two canvases which Monet painted between 1920 and 19262. The archway appears to have been designed to just allow the viewer to experience the vast Water Lily Pond; it leaves one guessing at what else might be in the room beyond.
It is hard to convey the impact of Water Lily Pond in words; much less so in images, as the colours are so far from those of the physical canvas3. When I entered the anteroom, a woman was standing stock-still before the archway, legs together and arms by her side, as if called. She seemed quite calm and also as if she were completely elsewhere. The effect of the architecture — the smaller, dimly-lit anteroom disclosing into the much huger, white room, flooded with natural light, — very much gave the feeling that something was being revealed, that the audience was going on a journey from nothingness into a world of subtlety; into a world of hue and play and colour. It is not an understatement to say it was on par with a religious experience.
I wrote today’s poem thinking about Monet’s water lillies, which in many cases are barely perceptible against the ground of the painting. On other occasions they stand out clearly, punctuation marks in a sentence. The water lillies are like something revealed to us, the way a gaze is like something revealed to us.
MONET'S WATER LILLIES / MY CAT'S EYES I cannot say, at last, what the cat might be afraid of. He'll hide whenever I make my entrance, flinch when I bend down to stroke behind his ears. Today, his two wide lamp-yellow eyes rise through black fur beneath the sofa to become water lillies in the bruised cradle of a Monet painting, hung in a perfectly white room where shoes are not allowed, where all of the light is natural light, in a gallery on an island some six thousand miles away.
In the case of James Turrell and Walter de Maria, the artists actually had a hand in designing the spaces themselves — which are of course integral to their art works.
I am astonished to read today that Monet made over 250 of his Water Lily series paintings. How strange that I had to travel from Europe all the way to Japan to have my eyes opened to his work.
My partner noted too that, on our second viewing, which was later in the day, the entire quality of the painting had shifted with the changing light in the room. It really was like seeing two different paintings on each viewing.