Perspective

I bought a large framed copy of  Monet's Japanese Garden back in 1999. I loved it, but I left it at my old house in North Carolina when I moved back to Illinois. It is one of those paintings that seems to check off all the boxes of near perfection for me and I have missed it.

I love bridges. I like the way they are engineered, the way they span the distance between two things in both an artistic and functional way and I like that they are usually over water.

I like the colors of this particular painting. Deep greens and blues highlighted with touches of yellow and a dab of pink.

I think this picture portrays nature at her best, soft, verdant, reflective.

I realized that the size and perspective of this painting made a difference to me. When I began to look for a replacement I had to search for the right color scheme, because Monet did this in various colors. Then people began hacking it into difference size canvases. Square ones looked disproportionately wrong. A span of bridge this size cannot be correctly placed in a square. It looks chopped off.  And even rectangular versions have often altered the depth of the overall painting by cropping them at the incorrect place top or bottom. It took months before I found one that included the whole scene in the proper rectangular shape and size that allowed me to lose myself in the picture and not the mechanics of someone else's interpretation.

Now I can sit and look at this canvas for hours. It gives me a feeling of peace and well being, and evokes a sense of possibilities I cannot put into words, which is a perspective rarely found in my world.