Between 1897 until the time of his death in 1926, Claude Monet painted nothing short of 250 pictures for his “Water-lilies” series inspired from the pond located on his estate in Giverny, France. In this series, Monet helped strengthen the roots of Modernist painting and paved the way for Abstraction by radically removing the horizon line from his water landscapes. Traditionally, a painting had been thought of as a window through which one could look upon a convincing scene, a scene gravitationally-bound. By focusing on the reflections of sky, atmospheric color, and clouds upon the lily-dappled water, Monet presented the viewer with a spacial ambiguity. He introduced a confusion of surface, not only in the picture itself (the plane of the water coupled with the soaring heights of the sky, complete with murky underwater tones), but also in the orientation of the picture, with horizontal subject matter presented as vertical object. With hardly a stretch of the imagination it is easy to see how the heaven-collapsed, aqueous plateau of “Water-lilies” forms a parallel to understanding the nature of image in our present-day era of widely dispersed screens in which computer surface allows one instantaneous access to “clouds” of data. It is in this computer framework of brigthness radiating from our separately-connected rectangles that we discover the deep reflections found in the paintings of American artist Dan Ellis.
Between 1897 until the time of his death in 1926, Claude Monet painted nothing short of 250 pictures for his “Water-lilies” series inspired from the pond located on his estate in Giverny, France. In this series, Monet helped strengthen the roots of Modernist painting and paved the way for Abstraction by radically removing the horizon line from his water landscapes. Traditionally, a painting had been thought of as a window through which one could look upon a convincing scene, a scene gravitationally-bound. By focusing on the reflections of sky, atmospheric color, and clouds upon the lily-dappled water, Monet presented the viewer with a spacial ambiguity. He introduced a confusion of surface, not only in the picture itself (the plane of the water coupled with the soaring heights of the sky, complete with murky underwater tones), but also in the orientation of the picture, with horizontal subject matter presented as vertical object. With hardly a stretch of the imagination it is easy to see how the heaven-collapsed, aqueous plateau of “Water-lilies” forms a parallel to understanding the nature of image in our present-day era of widely dispersed screens in which computer surface allows one instantaneous access to “clouds” of data. It is in this computer framework of brigthness radiating from our separately-connected rectangles that we discover the deep reflections found in the paintings of American artist Dan Ellis.