San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk by Claude Monet (My favorite painting)

Painted by Claude Monet, this is one of my favorite paintings. An impressionist, Claude Monet painted this after he came back from his visit to Venice. While there, he was so entranced by the sights, the he only made "impressions" of what he saw since he believed that Venice was too beautiful to paint and he refused to paint structures that had already been depicted in paintings by various artists.

The reason I'm in love with this painting is because of two things.

The first is that Venice is my dream city- a place I would like to visit someday in the unforeseeable future. I've been obsessed with it ever since I played Assassin's Creed 2 and had the chance to catch a glimpse of what this beautiful city must have looked like more than five hundred years ago in the Renaissance period.

The painting was painted years later and I wondered if perhaps Venice's natural beauty would be marred and hidden by thousands of advertisement billboards or graffiti or anything else that would tarnish the beautiful structures. So Monet's impression of what he saw when he was in Venice, is perfect. It is from far away and he uses colors and small brush strokes to bring about the form of the building.

The other reason I find this painting enticing is because of the sunset. Yes, sunsets are unquestionably beautiful. It is the time of day when the sky turns into a beautiful shade of golden orange and for some reason there's always peace surrounding it. But what I really like about sunsets is when the sun has receded further down and the sky turns into a giant rainbow. That was my impression of dusk when I was a kid. I always imagined there was a giant rainbow with blues, greens, orange and yellows somewhere in the universe that we could see when the sun would set.

That moment is filled with wonder for me and so what drew me to this painting was the colors of dusk serving as a background to my dream city.

I imagined this is what art is all about- to bring about emotions in the audience and fill them with wonder. This painting transports me in a world I wish I was in, that is filled with wonder and tranquility.