Weeping Willow 1919

Claude Monet made this painting of a Weeping Willow with oil on canvas, no date given. Monet's marks are like a kind of weather, a flurry of touches. You can almost feel the wind rustling through the leaves! The paint application is, on the one hand, completely straightforward and honest, but at the same time, it dematerializes everything into light and color. I'm struck by the lower left corner, the almost-blue-ish blobs of paint. It looks like pure abstraction when you zoom in, but then it becomes part of this larger whole, like how the individual brushstrokes work as building blocks to create the overall impression of the willow. Monet's really got something here, this idea of painting as a way of capturing a fleeting moment. It reminds me a bit of Morisot, actually, her loose brushwork, the way she lets the paint breathe. There's a real conversation happening across time. Art doesn't have to resolve everything; it can embrace the in-between spaces.