Ephemeral Shores: The Vanishing Coastline

Claude Monet’s  Étretat, the Beach and the Eastern Rock Arch (1885) is a luminous ode to the interplay of land, sea, and sky. The cliffs of Étretat, immortalized in Monet’s masterful strokes, rise above the coastline, shaped by the relentless tides. In his original work, Monet captures the fleeting beauty of the moment—the way the sun dances upon the water, the way the cliffs seem both permanent and vulnerable under the changing light. It is a meditation on time, on the forces that shape and erode the landscape. 

This surreal reinterpretation dissolves the boundary between permanence and impermanence, blending Monet’s vision of Étretat with a shifting dreamscape of sand, water, and fragmented earth. The coastline does not merely exist—it drifts, merges, and transforms. The cliffs still stand, but their edges blur into abstraction, as if they are dissolving before our eyes, carried away by the whispering tides of time. 

The lower portion of the piece introduces vast dunes, rolling fields, and undefined landscapes, their textures melting into one another as though memories of different places are merging. The sand, wind-sculpted and fluid, overtakes the solidity of the cliffs, creating a paradox—what was once stable now shifts like waves, what was once a fixed landmark is now transient, uncertain. The result is a landscape untethered from a single moment, existing in a state of constant evolution. 

The colors remain true to Monet’s palette—soft blues, golden sands, and gentle greens—yet they are diffused, layered, as if seen through a veil of time itself. The water, vibrant and clear, reflects not just the sky but something deeper, something intangible. It is a threshold, a place where reality and memory converge. The figures on the beach, barely discernible, appear like remnants of another time, their presence uncertain, as if they could vanish with the next tide. 

As an artist, my goal with this reinterpretation was to explore the impermanence of place. Monet painted Étretat as a celebration of nature’s beauty, but also as a recognition of its fragility—coastlines change, cliffs crumble, the sea reclaims what once seemed immovable. In this artwork, that theme is pushed further: what if the land itself is not just shaped by time, but is time itself? What if the cliffs and dunes, the waves and the sky, are all part of the same ephemeral breath, appearing only for a moment before shifting into something new? 

This piece also questions the way we perceive landscapes. Is a place truly a fixed point, or is it the sum of all the moments, all the changes, all the memories that have passed through it? By layering multiple textures and forms, this artwork suggests that no place is ever just one thing. The Étretat of Monet’s time is not the Étretat of today, and it will not be the Étretat of tomorrow. 

The dreamlike quality of the piece reflects the way memory alters perception. The dunes in the foreground do not belong here, yet they seem natural, as if the cliffs of Étretat could just as easily fade into a desert, into fields, into the shifting earth. Water and sand blend together, mirroring each other in a way that suggests that the ocean’s edge is not just where land ends, but where time folds into itself. 

Through this artwork, I wanted to invite the viewer to see landscapes not as static places, but as living, breathing entities—ones that change not just through the forces of nature, but through the way we remember them, the way we hold onto them even as they slip away.