Artwork Title: Nasturtiums

Nasturtiums, 1892

Gustave Caillebotte

Nasturtiums is more complex than it appears on the surface. Its beautifully varied natural blue, lavender, green, and red silks, trace the metaphysical strands of color into a visual image, weaving an extraordinary poetic image, which curves beyond the surface into the nature of light. Caillebotte's composition nuances the relationship between image and its material space, its color, texture, shadow, and reaches toward the dreamlike basis of the conscious imagination and the inner landscape of what we are. The image moves into this space, not, however, by defining or explaining, but by involving us in the continuum and resiliency that is derived from natural cycle and the nature of pattern. The image keeps coming into our awareness in color and pattern, where it represents a desire to engage one’s self with nature and the poetic image. It is the point where the visible comes together with the invisible and transcends the moment by translating the poetic image into art, and it derives its spirit from the freedom to move into our lives. In Nasturtiums, the physical evidence of that spirit is in the union of nature and image, which has its origins in the long formative period of the human mind, when we first consciously manipulated language, art, design, and fashion into an intellectual and complex metaphor for the interlace of leaves, trees, vines, color, and cycles of light and shadow. [http://www.aurlaea.com/article-144-nasturtiums_gustave_caillebotte_c_1892.html]
Uploaded on Feb 18, 2018 by Suzan Hamer

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