Frequencies of Thought: The Horizon Between Reality and Memory

Claude Monet’s  Cliff near Dieppe, Overcast Skies (1897) is a contemplative study of light and shadow, capturing the silent presence of the French coastline under a heavy sky. Unlike his sunlit, atmospheric works, this piece leans into a moodier palette, where the cliffs feel weighty and immovable, their surfaces catching only the faintest traces of shifting light. Monet’s brushwork suggests an impending storm—an impression of nature’s quiet before the inevitable rush of wind and rain. 

This conceptual reinterpretation distorts that quiet moment, transforming it into a surreal meditation on thought, perception, and the modern fragmentation of reality. The cliffs, once a natural force, have dissolved into the contours of a woman’s mind—her expression introspective, her thoughts visualized as swirling clouds and electric energy that crackle at the edges of consciousness. The world around her bends, reshaped into an environment where time, technology, and memory collide. 

At the base of the composition, a television flickers—a relic of a past era, yet still an emblem of how images shape perception. Instead of reflecting a landscape, it projects something more intangible: a human hand reaching outward, as though trying to grasp the past or break free from a constructed illusion. The road stretching into the distance is not just a physical path—it is a metaphor for thought itself, leading toward an uncertain horizon, vanishing into colors that do not belong to nature but to the synthetic glow of memory and imagination. 

The trees that line the scene are spectral, their trunks infused with unnatural neon hues—electric blues, glowing greens, and deep magentas. They evoke both the digital and the organic, suggesting a world where the distinction between nature and artificiality is no longer clear. The sky, filled with rolling clouds, echoes Monet’s overcast landscape, yet here, it is interwoven with an almost dreamlike iridescence, as if reality is shifting mid-thought. 

Color plays an essential role in creating this altered reality. Monet’s original palette of muted grays and earthy tones has been reimagined into a spectrum of hyper-saturated hues. The pink and violet undertones that permeate the composition create a sense of emotional intensity—an internal landscape rather than an external one. The neon blues and greens disrupt the natural order, reinforcing the presence of technology and artificial perception in an otherwise organic world. This contrast between soft, hazy impressionistic clouds and stark, vibrant pop-art colors underscores the idea of conflicting realities—past versus future, nature versus machine, experience versus recollection. 

As an artist, my intention was to explore the way thoughts function like shifting landscapes—unpredictable, layered, and constantly evolving. Monet’s cliffs, once solid and sure, now exist within the form of a mind lost in contemplation, their edges dissolving into ideas rather than stone. The overcast sky, which in Monet’s world signaled an impending storm, here becomes a metaphor for mental turbulence, the swirling uncertainty of modern consciousness. 

The presence of the television is deliberate—a symbol of how perception is filtered, how what we see is mediated through screens, devices, and digital distortions. The hand emerging from it is reaching for something real, something tangible, but is it reaching outward or being pulled inward? The screen itself is a threshold, a liminal space between reality and illusion, between memory and projection. 

The road, winding into the distance, is both a literal and figurative journey. Where does it lead? To clarity? To further distortion? The answer remains uncertain, just as the mind itself is an endless pathway of shifting thoughts, recollections, and imagined futures. 

This piece is not merely a reinterpretation of Monet’s  Cliff near Dieppe, Overcast Skies —it is an exploration of how landscape and consciousness mirror each other. Just as the cliffs once stood firm against the sea, so too do our thoughts stand momentarily before dissolving, reshaped by experience, by technology, by time itself. The storm is no longer just in the sky—it is within, an ever-present force shaping the way we see, remember, and perceive the world around us.