Currents of Time: The Echoes of Le Havre

Claude Monet’s  Fishing Boats Leaving the Harbor, Le Havre (1874) captures the dynamism of the bustling port city, a place where the sea, sky, and human activity blend into one. Painted during the early years of Impressionism, Monet’s original work is alive with movement—boats drifting upon the water, silhouetted figures strolling along the shore, the harbor pulsing with energy as the day begins. His brushwork is quick, his colors luminous yet diffused, evoking the fleeting light and shifting atmosphere of the coastline. 

This abstract reinterpretation transforms Monet’s harbor scene into a layered meditation on memory, distortion, and time. The boats remain, their sails catching the wind, but the composition is no longer fixed in a single moment. Instead, the image bends and refracts, like a memory slipping between the past and the present. The harbor, once a place of movement and departure, is now a fluid, shifting entity, where reality dissolves into overlapping impressions, as if seen through the rippling surface of water. 

Circular forms rise from the composition—transparent spheres that seem to hover over the scene, acting as both portals and reflections. Are they echoes of past departures, lingering impressions of boats long gone? Or are they distortions, reminders that memory is never clear, that history itself is subject to the same shifting currents as the sea? The overlapping planes of light and shadow suggest multiple realities coexisting—Monet’s Le Havre, the present moment, and an imagined future where the harbor is but a dream. 

The sky, no longer merely a backdrop, carries streaks of abstraction, as if the horizon is unraveling. Streaks of deep navy and charcoal blend with the softness of Monet’s original palette, introducing an almost digital quality—like a glitch in time, a disruption of the past’s solidity. The harbor is still there, yet it is fragmented, floating between layers of perception, inviting the viewer to question what is real and what is merely the impression of something once seen. 

Color is used here not just to capture light, but to evoke emotion. The cool blues and grays of the water maintain Monet’s delicate balance of atmosphere, yet they are now overlaid with hints of warm gold and pale violet—tones that do not belong entirely to the physical world, but to the realm of nostalgia, of places half-remembered, half-dreamed. The circular distortions, tinged with rose and amber, introduce an ethereal warmth, as if the past is glowing just beneath the surface, waiting to emerge. 

As an artist, my vision for this piece was to explore the act of remembering—how images do not remain fixed in time, but instead shift, distort, and reform with each recollection. Monet painted Le Havre as it was in 1874, a harbor alive with commerce and motion. But what happens when we look back upon a place through the lens of time? Does it remain the same, or does it become something else—something blurred, something reshaped by our own perspective? 

The floating circles within the composition represent that process of recollection—the way certain details stand out while others fade, the way memories overlay upon themselves like layers of paint on a canvas. The deconstructed elements in the sky and water suggest that history is never truly linear, that past moments ripple into the present, influencing how we see and interpret the world around us. 

This piece is not just about Le Havre as a port, but about Le Havre as an idea—a place of departure, of shifting tides, of fleeting moments that linger in the mind long after the boats have sailed. The figures along the shore are blurred, indistinct, their forms merging into the mist of memory. They are not just people of Monet’s time; they are all who have stood at the water’s edge, watching as the boats drift toward an uncertain horizon. 

Through this abstract reimagining, I wanted to capture not just the visual beauty of Monet’s work, but the emotional weight of looking back—of seeing a place not as it was, but as it is remembered, shaped by time, longing, and the impermanence of all things. The harbor of Le Havre is still here, but it exists now as a dream, a current of time flowing endlessly forward, carrying its echoes with it.