Fragments of Light: A Landscape Remembered

Claude Monet’s  Cliff at Pourville in the Morning (1882) is a masterful study of light and atmosphere, a moment captured along the rugged Normandy coast where land, sea, and sky dissolve into one another. Pourville, a place Monet returned to often, was a source of inspiration—its shifting tides and changing weather offering an ever-evolving canvas. The original painting is a testament to Impressionism’s pursuit of fleeting beauty, where color and movement intertwine to create a landscape that feels as though it is breathing. 

This conceptual collage expands upon Monet’s vision, not by preserving the landscape, but by deconstructing it—layering time, memory, and geography into a fragmented tapestry. The cliffs of Pourville remain, but they are no longer alone. They are now part of a greater, impossible landscape, where mountains rise from the sands of an unknown desert, waterfalls spill from one reality into another, and a lighthouse stands watch over a land that no longer belongs to a single place. 

The composition is a collision of worlds, a meditation on the way memory distorts place, blending past and present, real and imagined. The cliffs of Normandy now merge seamlessly with distant dunes, as though time itself has shifted, revealing a lost connection between shorelines separated by continents. Waterfalls carve through rock, cutting across Monet’s brushstrokes, cascading into an abyss where ocean and earth collide. This is not merely a landscape—it is a dream of one, a vision of how places are never truly separate but exist as echoes within each other. 

The presence of the lighthouse is significant. In the original  Cliff at Pourville , there was no such structure—only the natural grandeur of the coastline, painted with the urgency of a moment before it changed forever. Here, the lighthouse serves as a beacon of continuity, a reminder that even in the shifting of landscapes, there is still something that endures. It is both a guide and a witness, standing at the edge of reality, illuminating the fractured terrain below. 

Color is central to this transformation. Monet’s soft morning blues and delicate peach hues remain, but they are now overlaid with bolder, more surreal contrasts. The warm desert tones speak of time’s erosion, the way landscapes change over millennia. The cool greens and blues of the cliffs and ocean anchor the composition, evoking Monet’s Impressionist palette while suggesting that nature, even when reshaped, still holds its essence. The waterfalls, painted with translucent strokes, act as a bridge—water connecting sky to earth, past to present. 

As an artist, my intention with this piece was to explore how landscapes exist beyond a single moment. Monet painted Pourville as he saw it on a particular morning in 1882, but places are never just one thing. They are layered with memories, with the erosion of time, with the echoes of other places that seem impossibly distant yet inherently connected. This artwork is a meditation on that idea—that no place exists in isolation, that nature is a tapestry woven through time, that even as we try to capture a moment, it is already dissolving into something new. 

The lighthouse, the cliffs, the waterfalls, the dunes—each element represents a different thread of existence. The waterfalls symbolize the passage of time, carving the landscape as history does. The desert suggests the remnants of an ancient world, where water once flowed but now only sand remains. The cliffs stand resolute, as they did in Monet’s time, but they too are changing, merging with this surreal geography. And the lighthouse remains, silent, steady, a reminder that even as the world shifts, there are still things that hold their place. 

This piece is not simply about reimagining Monet’s  Cliff at Pourville —it is about expanding it, breaking it open to reveal the layers that exist beneath any single vision of a place. The coastline of Normandy is not just the coastline of Normandy; it is connected to every shore, every wave, every past and future landscape that will ever exist. By blending these elements together, the artwork asks the viewer to reconsider what a landscape truly is—is it what we see, or is it the sum of everything that came before it and everything it will become?