The Stamen at the Heart of the Lily

Monet painted water lilies for the last thirty years of his life and was never done with them. The picture above does not pretend to be Monet — that would be both arrogant and pointless — but it does pretend to ask Monet's question. The question Monet asked of water lilies was not what they look like. It was what the act of looking at them does to the looker. A camera could have answered the first question with more precision than any of his canvases. Only painting could answer the second.

The composition pulls in much closer than Monet ever did. Where his canvases showed a pond surface, this picture shows what is at the center of one particular flower — the cluster of golden anthers and filaments that make a water lily a water lily and not just another pretty pink object floating on water. The macro frame is the modernist contribution to a very old subject. The impressionist treatment is the older tradition acknowledging that the modernist contribution did not actually solve anything that mattered.

The brushwork is doing structural work. The stamen cluster at the heart of the flower is rendered with the heaviest impasto in the picture — small thick dabs of cadmium yellow and ochre, layered to suggest dimensional pollen rather than to describe it. The petals around the stamen are rendered in longer, looser strokes of cream, soft rose, and pearl pink that catch the light and let it go without ever fully resolving into the smooth surface a petal photographically has. The shadow recesses behind the petals are deep — viridian, ultramarine, the occasional hint of magenta — colors that you do not actually see in a real water lily shadow but that broken-color theory says will read as a darker version of the surrounding pinks once the eye assembles them at viewing distance. They do.

The water droplets are the small concession to the macro frame. A pure impressionist treatment would have dissolved the droplets into the same painterly haze as everything else. The droplets here have just enough rendering to read as discrete objects — a slightly tighter brushstroke, a small highlight where the morning light catches them. They sit on the picture like punctuation marks. They are how the picture reminds you that this is a real flower in a real moment, even though everything else in the composition is agreeing not to be too literal about that.

The dissolution into the surrounding pond and lily pads at the edges of the frame is the impressionist's argument that the central object is part of a larger atmospheric whole. Outside of the focal flower the brushwork loosens further, the colors cool, and the world goes a little blue and a little indistinct. This is what an impressionist macro looks like. The macro frame provides the focal subject. The impressionist treatment refuses to let the subject pretend it can be looked at apart from its setting. Both things are true. The picture lives in the small space where they both stay true at once.

You could keep looking at the central stamen cluster for a long time without running out of things to see. The light is going to keep catching the pollen. The droplets are going to keep holding their small reflections. The petals are going to keep dissolving at the edges into the pond. Whether you read the picture as a study of a flower or as a study of how attention works on a flower will depend on how long you stay with it.

Monet would have approved of the question. He would have preferred a slightly larger canvas.