Beachball boomerang

A poem for today.

BEACHBALL BOOMERANG

Throw a beachball into the breeze,
And it will blow right back to you.
Embrace it easy as you please.
Happiness can work that way, too

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ABOVE: “The Luncheon of the Boating Party,” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1881.

It’s one of the most famous paintings from the Impressionist Movement. It’s also a group portrait. How do we know this? Because the brushwork on the faces is finer than elsewhere in the painting.

It also contains a still life in the middle, on the table, and a landscape in the background.

All components of this painting are real – the people, friends and acquaintances of Renoir, and the place, the Maison Fournaise, a riverside social hub that attracted Parisians to the Seine.

Like many things that are considered mainstream over time, Impressionism was radical at birth. Renoir, along with his pal Monet, were the midwives.

Impressionist paintings were ridiculed and rejected by salons and academics, but then, academics have been getting the future wrong for a long time.

A Monet painting, “Impression, Sunrise,” 1882, was mocked by critics, and the movement was tagged with the name.

The heyday of the movement was the last half of the 1800s, but the style happily endures, mostly because people, including me, really like it.

Light and delight on canvas. What’s not to like?

Renoir is said to have spent a year and a half perfecting the portraits before putting it all together in his studio. It is carefully composed with classical influences. This wasn’t the common method for Impressionist works, which were often painted “en plein air,” which is hoity-toity art lingo for “outside,” giving many of the paintings the sensibility of a snapshot.