Beginning with Water Lilies — Art, Memory and a Long-Familiar Feeling

Yesterday I wandered through the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra once again.

I had no particular plan and no specific work in mind. As I walked through the galleries, I naturally found myself standing in front of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies.

It was not the first time. Somehow, almost every visit eventually leads me back to that painting.

I have never considered myself someone who truly understands painting.

As a child, I was hopeless at drawing. I might begin with the intention of drawing a puppy, only to discover that it looked more like a tiger by the time I finished. When I tried to draw a person, the head would gradually take up most of the page, leaving no room for the body.

Looking back, I do not think I lacked practical ability in general. Drawing simply was not one of my strengths.

Strangely enough, I have always enjoyed looking at paintings.

For years, I could not explain why. We often assume that people naturally enjoy the things they are good at, but that was clearly not the case for me.

Then one day it occurred to me that perhaps what attracted me was never the skill of painting itself. It was the feeling that paintings created.

When I was only a few years old, my father owned several large books containing colour reproductions of oil paintings. One image has remained particularly vivid in my memory. It showed Dr Norman Bethune walking along a high slope, with clouds and what seemed to be distant villages behind him.

Most of the details have faded, but the feeling has remained.

Children do not look at paintings in the way adults do.

I knew nothing about composition or colour. I had never heard of Impressionism, and I certainly did not wonder what the artist intended to express. For a small child, the boundary between a painting and a real world is not always very clear.

The book seemed enormous in my hands, and the image seemed equally large. Looking at it felt less like observing a picture and more like entering a place.

The colours, the sky, the distant villages, my father’s explanations and the quiet warmth of home all became part of a single memory.

It was not merely visual. It had warmth, sound and even a kind of atmosphere that memory somehow preserved.

Many years later, during my first trip to Switzerland, I stood on a hillside and was suddenly overwhelmed by a powerful sense of familiarity.

I knew I had never been there before, yet the feeling was unmistakable.

I stood there for some time, trying to understand where it came from.

Only after learning a little psychology did I begin to see a possible explanation. Perhaps the landscape itself was unfamiliar, but the emotional experience it awakened was not.

The scenery was new. The feeling was old.

The hillside, the sky and the distant villages may have reactivated something left behind by those childhood paintings. What had survived in memory was perhaps not one particular image, but a whole experience formed by colour, home, my father’s voice and a child’s sense of safety.

That made me realise that our relationship with art may begin long before we learn anything about art history or artistic technique. Art can enter memory before we even have a concept of what art is.

Canberra is not a large city.

People in smaller places often know their local landmarks and cultural treasures well. Monet’s Water Lilies at the National Gallery of Australia is one of those familiar works.

The painting, formally titled Nymphéas, was created around 1914–1917 and belongs to Monet’s late period. The National Gallery of Australia acquired it in 1979. Over the decades, it has become one of the gallery’s most important and recognisable works.

When the Australian Government announced a related loan program in 2023, the painting was valued at approximately A$174 million.

Yet whenever I stand in front of it, its price is never what matters to me.

I still do not really know how one is supposed to appreciate a painting.

Gradually, I began to suspect that this might be the wrong question.

Why do I always feel the need to understand it?

Impressionism does not try to reproduce every contour and detail with exact precision. It is more concerned with the way light, air and colour act together upon vision at a particular moment.

For me, standing too close often reveals only loose brushstrokes and fragments of colour. When I step back, the surface of the water, the light, the colour and the surrounding space begin to form a whole.

That does not mean the painting should never be examined closely. At close range, one can see Monet’s brushwork and the physical layers of paint. But what stops me in front of the work is not the accuracy of any single stroke. It is the atmosphere that suddenly appears when the whole painting comes together.

From the late nineteenth century onwards, Monet repeatedly returned to the pond he had created at Giverny. Water Lilies became one of the central subjects of the final three decades of his life.

He produced more than two hundred works related to the theme. The subject remained almost unchanged, yet no two paintings are identical.

The pond was never the only thing being painted.

The light changed. The weather changed. The seasons and the hours changed. Monet’s eyesight, body and state of mind changed as well.

The same pond, seen again and again, became many different worlds.

This makes me think of music.

When I listen to music, I rarely begin by asking what it means. Music certainly has structure, rhythm, harmony and rules of its own, but what reaches us first is often not a clear semantic message. It is an overall experience.

Painting can work in much the same way.

A work of art is not necessarily a sentence waiting to be translated. It may not contain a single central meaning that can be stated precisely. We can study its historical context, composition, colour and technique, and such knowledge can help us see more. But explanation cannot replace the experience of the work itself.

Children are naturally good at this more direct kind of experience.

A child does not need to justify liking a picture. A child does not analyse the harmonic structure of a melody before responding to it. The image or sound simply arrives, and something happens.

As adults, we become increasingly accustomed to understanding the world through language, rules and logic. We search for causes, definitions and conclusions. We try to convert experience into forms that can be explained.

These abilities are essential. Science depends on them, and so does philosophy.

Yet art reminds us that logic is not the only way in which human beings relate to the world.

Art is not anti-logical, nor is it without rules. It simply reaches us by another route. Before language and explanation begin, colour, sound, rhythm, the body and memory can already make something felt.

Perhaps this is how we encountered art as children. As adults, we gain knowledge, but we sometimes forget how to look before explaining, how to listen before interpreting, and how to allow a feeling to form before turning it into an idea.

Standing in front of Water Lilies yesterday, I realised that I may still not know how to appreciate painting properly.

But perhaps that no longer matters.

What matters is that the painting can still make me stop.

It brings back the books of my childhood, my father’s voice, the unexplained familiarity of a hillside in Switzerland, and the realisation that some memories are not preserved as clear stories.

They may remain quietly within the body and the mind as a colour, a sky, a sound or a particular atmosphere.

Years later, when a similar scene appears, they suddenly return.

If a painting can do that, perhaps that is already enough.