the enveloping air

 Monet was a patron of the Impressionist movement, who seized upon the delicate, hazy, fleeting nuances in his paintings, which are so beautifully rendered into depictions of water and sky, mists and flowers. The style of impressionism he rendered sought the indefinable moment in time using short, slashing strokes applied heavily or, otherwise scarcely grazing the canvas to depict  reflections of light on snow. When he painted his Haystacks (1890-91), he was dubbed a “poet of nature”, even if had painted said haystacks twenty times. At one point in his life, Monet admitted to painting the enveloping air around his subjects, a technique that would aid him to “follow it like following a thought”.