For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life - the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of atmosphere in perceiving and appreciating landscapes, suggesting that context shapes our experience of beauty.
Claude Monet's quote reflects his belief that landscapes are not static entities; rather, they are dynamic and constantly changing based on various external factors like light and air. The surrounding atmosphere plays a critical role in how landscapes are perceived, imparting life and true value to them. By focusing on the interplay between the landscape and its atmosphere, Monet highlights the subjective nature of beauty and how perception can change over time.
In practice
In an art class, to illustrate how light affects perception of paintings.
When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you - a tree, house, a field....Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you.
Zaandam has enough to paint for a lifetime.
The effect of sincerity is to give one's work the character of a protest. The painter, being concerned only with conveying his impression, simply seeks to be himself and no one else.
The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.
Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.
I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.
And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.
And I think as long as a song has beautiful lyrics, I'm so happy.
I've still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, 'You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's the truth.'
The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness.
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