Art & Music: "Woman with a Parasol" by Claude Monet, 1875 & "Ennio" by Michael McCormack (2006)
"Ennio" by Composer Michael McCormack (2006). All Rights Reserved.
Claude Monet
Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875
https://www.nga(dot)gov/collection/art-object-page.61379.html
https://michaelmccormackmusic(dot)com
Michael McCormack arranges, performs and customizes original music for film, television, internet and video productions. His scoring capabilities span a variety of genres ranging from classical, romantic symphonic to modern "electronic" music. Video production services are also available. Michael has composed, produced, and performed music for many high-profile projects, creating original music for the epic "Jaws" documentary "The Shark Is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of JAWS" (also credited as co-producer) and King Kong documentary, "Long Live the King" among many other documentaries and films.
Overview
With Manet's assistance, Monet found lodging in suburban Argenteuil in late 1871, a move that initiated one of the most fertile phases of his career. Impressionism evolved in the late 1860s from a desire to create full–scale, multi–figure depictions of ordinary people in casual outdoor situations. At its purest, impressionism was attuned to landscape painting, a subject Monet favored. In Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son, his skill as a figure painter is equally evident. Contrary to the artificial conventions of academic portraiture, Monet delineated the features of his sitters as freely as their surroundings. The spontaneity and naturalness of the resulting image were praised when it appeared in the second impressionist exhibition in 1876.
Woman with a Parasol was painted outdoors, probably in a single session of several hours' duration. The artist intended the work to convey the feeling of a casual family outing rather than a formal portrait, and used pose and placement to suggest that his wife and son interrupted their stroll while he captured their likenesses. The brevity of the moment portrayed here is conveyed by a repertory of animated brushstrokes of vibrant color, hallmarks of the style Monet was instrumental in forming. Bright sunlight shines from behind Camille to whiten the top of her parasol and the flowing cloth at her back, while colored reflections from the wildflowers below touch her front with yellow.
Oscar-Claude Monet , French: 14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a French painter and founder of impressionist painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism, especially in his attempts to paint nature as he perceived it. During his long career, he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of impressionism's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions of nature, especially as applied to plein air (outdoor) landscape painting. The term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant, exhibited in 1874 (the "exhibition of rejects") initiated by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon.
