Paintings and the Real Life

Last night when I was sorting the photos taken during the weekend when I went kayaking on Huron River with my friends, a really interesting one caught my eyes. In the picture, there is a boat in the middle of the river. My friend and I are sitting on the boat, taking a break from kayaking, effortlessly holding the paddles and turning our heads to look at three swans floating on the river. In the distance, there are trees with beautiful foliage of vibrant colors like red, yellow and green. Above the trees is the blue and cloudless sky, which is mirrored in the water, along with the reflections of us and the trees on the river bank.

This image immediately reminds me of the painting, In the Norwegian Boat at Giverny, by Claude Monet. In the painting, three girls in white dresses are boating on the Giverny river. Well, obviously they are dressed more elegantly than us, but the pleasant environment and the leisurely mood are quite similar with what we have in our photo (and we got swans lining up in the background!).

The idea of unconsciously recreating paintings in real life fascinates me. After all, the painters get their inspirations from reality. When I was studying abroad in Paris this past summer, I visited Auvers-sur-Oise, the village in which van Gogh spent his last two months of his life, on a Saturday. The little village keeps most sites that appear in van Gogh’s paintings unchanged over the past decade, and there is even a map that marks each site so visitors can take a themed tour of van Gogh. I went along the route. I saw the église (church), the wheat field, and Dr. Gachet’s house, and I was trying so hard to find the perfect angles in order to capture photos that are exactly the same with the paintings.

However, after I came back, it was this picture I randomly took that immediately melt my heart:

I didn’t even remember when I took this picture. However, it is definitely a perfect recurrence of the touching scene of parental love shown in van Gogh’s First Steps.

Some people describe Auvers-sur-Oise as an eternal village because it has little changed over the past decade and every corner is as beautiful as a painting. However, it seems that sometimes real life could be even more beautiful than paintings.

Awwww…cutest thing ever.